World of Spectrum gets a Visit from the IDSA

Dasaan writes "the World of Spectrum , a site that legally archives old Sinclair Spectrum games, has been accused of distributing copyrighted material by the IDSA . The list of games supposedly being offered on the site include titles such as Soldier Of Fortune and Barbarian. And a quick search of the site shows that these titles are indeed being offered, however they are the original versions that were released many years ago and have now been officially made legal to supply by the current copyright owners." Their correspondence is also available.

Abuse denied?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their correspondence is "Abuse denied?" With that attitude they'll get a lot of attorney friends.

Re:Devil's advocate

[kahei]

>I'm a big user of emulation - some MAME, a fair amount of C64 and also Amiga stuff

dude do u konw where I can get kof2001 romz or just email them 2 me thx otherwise u sux lol!!!

From address

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else notice the from address? "[e-mail]"

Back in 80's...

[hdparm]

...Boulder Dash and Manic Miner were amongst the first games that made me sit and play all night. There will be some downloading tonight, I tell ya.

Re:From address

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It's almost as if they expect that putting [e-mail] [mailto] on a popular website will lead to a lot of spam.

God, I'm childish.

Re:Legal archive?

[grahamlee]

A lot of the ROMs on that site *ARE* illegal.

ROMs, sir? ROMS?? I'll have you know that the Speccy was a fully tape-based computer, except for the Amstrad ones cos some of them had disk drives (though they were crappy disk drives, three-inch thingies). The only ROMs I've ever seen in a Spectrum are the ones that hold the Operating System, and those are freely distributable according to Amstrad.

You may be thinking of the very very VERY small number of cartridge games (i.e. 2) that were available for extensions like the multiface, etc. Or you may be confusing a proper computer like wot the spectrum woz for a two-bit eight-bit console like the NES.

IDSA Going Nuts

[DarkZero]

The IDSA seems to be on a roll when it comes to stupid cease and desist letters. Lik-Sang [lik-sang.com]'s ISP recently received a letter [lik-sang.com] from the IDSA alleging that they had "a good faith belief" that Lik-Sang was violating the DMCA (and apparently the DMCA applies to Hong Kong now?) because their prices were too cheap and that meant that they must be pirating the discs and selling them just above cost.

Lik-Sang, of course, went absolutely wild over it. They found it to be pretty hilarious and saw "So cheap, the IDSA finds it suspicious!" to be a brilliant selling point for their new "Price Crusher" promotion.

Re:RPN

[Anonymous Coward]

Only an RPN user would not do 6+7 in his head.

It was an example. Feel free to put pi, e, avadadro's (sp) number etc in place.

OK, let's go 5 ^ 13 + 2 / 3

ALG takes 9 keystrokes

RPN: 5 enter 13 ^ 2 enter 3 / + is 11 keystrokes

Congrads, you have found one of the rare examples where alg beats RPN. Now, lets double the result, then square it.

ALG: (2 * ans) sq = 7 keystrokes
RPN: 2 * sq 3 keystrokes

RPN comes out ahead now

Something similar just happened in Germany

[Tomcat666]

What a coincidence... something similar just happened to the German university of Münster.

The BSA sent the university a cease&desist-letter and told them to stop distributing MS Office over their FTP server.

Unfortunately, the file mentioned in the letter is "/mandrake_current/SRPMS/OpenOffice.org-1.0.1-9mdk .src.rpm". Now *that's* one pirated office!

Read more about it on Heise [heise.de] (sorry, German).