Re: Restoring Scott Adams adventures


23 Oct 1995 10:41:04 GMT

Jason Dyer <jdyer@indirect.com> wrote:
> Is this considered legal? I know both Pirate and Adventureland have
> been ported to other machines, but none of the others as far
> as I know.

Apparently "Pirate Adventure" and "Adventureland" were donated to the
public domain by Scott Adams, so (if true) it's legal to port them,
write works based on them, plagiarise them and so on. The other games
remain in copyright.

However, if someone already owned a copy of a Scott Adams game there
should be nothing stopping them from translating the game from one
format to another (it could be argued that translating a game from one
interpreter format to another is not qualititively different from
translating it from one disk format to another, and certainly most
agreements with software companies allow you to make backup copies of
your software).

Every so often, someone posts to r.a.i-f saying "unlike the Infocom
games, there's no-one selling the Scott Adams games, and Adams himself
has disavowed all interest in his work; wouldn't it be nice if someone
could contact him and persuade him to donate all of the games into the
public domain?"

--
Gareth Rees