🚀 go-pugleaf

Neil A Haldar writes:
>
>Then... see if those copyrights/trademarks/patents are still in effect... I 
>don't remember what the law is, but I believe a patent is 7 years and a 
>copyright is 20 or so; and these of course can be extended.

In the U.S. it's 50 years plus the life of the individual for
copyrights held by individuals and 75 years for corporations.
So a lot of these "old" games are going to be copyrighted for a
loooong time.

Remember too that almost always *somebody* owns the copryright
for any given game.  If the company goes bankrupt, the author
dies, etc., the rights will just move on to somebody else unless
they are explicitly made public domain or the copyright expires.

Did you read about Wolfenstein 3-D in GameBytes?  The rights to
the original Castle Wolfenstein ended up belonging to a woman
somewhere who couldn't have cared less about the game. 

--
James Hague   
exuhag@exu.ericsson.se