🚀 go-pugleaf

If you are talking about cloning -- writing from scratch an exact copy, you
can still get into trouble.  In the Pacman example, for instance, the pac
man character can be copyrighted.  Now you can duplicate the game, but if
your player token looks loke a little round ball with a bug mouth, you may
be sued for stealing the character, not the game.  In the MSDOS example,
remember what happened to Eagle(?) computers when they tried to duplicate the
ROM BIOS for MSDOS.  Some of the engineers had SEEN listings of the IBM BIOS
so they got sued for copying even though the copy was not exact and had been
substantially written from scratch.  (There is a company who now makes a
living selling a compatible BIOS written from scratch by engineers who NEVER
have LOOKED at the IBM BIOS.)

I would have said it is possible to clone most commercial products without
fear up until now, because you were cloning the function and not copying the
program.  Maybe the visual imagry of the Mac makes it enough like a work of
art (in the legal, not the aesthetic sense) to make it protectable under
copyright law.  Remember, the details of the case are not disclosed.
-- 
Kurt Guntheroth
John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc.
{uw-beaver,decvax!microsof,ucbvax!lbl-csam,allegra,ssc-vax}!fluke!kurt