After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984.
I’m not entirely sure on the legalities of what the Internet Archive is doing – since I don’t see any confirmation Apple is participating in this – but I’m obviously very happy they’re doing this.
In many cases, companies look the other way when people post abandonware, old ROMs, etc. They realize that there is little commercial value in these things, so why piss off some nostalgic fans of your company’s products?
What often spurs a company into action is when some low-life decides he’s going to sell a product incorporating the firm’s intellectual property — like a game cartridge that incorporates dozens of commercial games. That often forces the company to take legal action to protect their trademarks and copyrights.
Edited 2017-04-17 22:16 UTC
I could be mistaken, but I believe that Apple’s protection of ROMs was only ever to control who could and couldn’t manufacture computers that could run Mac OS.
The question I would have, rather than the legality of using the ROM, is whether it is kosher to run this emulator on a non-Apple computer.
Apple owns the copyright… it’s only “kosher” to run this ROM on the hardware it was originally sold with…. because that is all Apple has ever approved.
But when it comes down to it… I personally would consider using the ROM in the way it is now in emulators fair use… any profit Apple ever deserved to make off of it has been made long ago. That said if they wanted to license the rom for $20 a pop … I’d be happy to pay them for it as long as the license was not restrictive in any way. It used to be people gave software away… and were happy if you sent them a few bucks… software these days is decidedly meh.
cb88,
I do agree, but modern copyright law has been perverted beyond reason. We’ll all be dead before today’s copyrighted works are freed thanks to the mickey mouse laws bought by the corporate lobbyists.
Apple already killed several hackintoshes and emulators such Spectre (from Gadgets by Small) on Atari ST because they used their ROMs but not their hardware.
If you can borrow chips from a legacy Macintosh and image the content, that’s the trick they cannot prevent you from, yet it is hard to find nowadays.
On the other hand, they released the source from QuickDraw and MacPaint some years back, so obviously they can release a bit the grip on their old IPs.
You can still get the Basilisk Mac emulator (basically a 68K color Mac emulator). That’s pretty much what killed the Mac emulation “market” – not Apple, but a free emulator.
I made a port of it to the PSP some years back, and the archive I had on mediafire got a DMCA notice… from whoever was handling movie DMCAs at the time – they thought it was the MOVIE Basilisk rather than the emulator. I filled out the protest forms mediafire provided, but they didn’t put the file back. So I renamed the archive and reuploaded it.
Anywho, I learned my lesson – give your shared files names that can’t possibly trigger against movies or songs or commercial games. The automatic notice software really sucks, and companies that send false notices NEVER get punished.
Kochise,
Oh I agree, if you have the original, then morally you have the upper ground to do what you want with it. It doesn’t mean apple couldn’t try to sue you anyways, but IMHO it would be foolish for apple to sue it’s own legitimate licensees over where they install it. As far as I know apple hasn’t taken end users to court.
Edited 2017-04-18 14:52 UTC
It’s only a matter of time…
http://archive.org/about/dmca.php
“Following deliberation, the Copyright Office ruled in late October 2003 that four exemptions should be added to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, to be valid until the next Copyright Office rulemaking in 2006, including two that are related to the Internet Archive’s original comments:
Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.
Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.”
Edited 2017-04-18 21:14 UTC
jmck,
That’s an insightful link. My issue with the DMCA exceptions is that the rights granted under them are not permanent but temporary and on the condition that they be continuously reauthorized every 3 years. This means if they become a low priority or if there’s a lame duck situation for any reason, the exceptions automatically terminate.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/248726/jailbreaking_waivers_set_to_e…
IMHO this is a compelling reason not to run archive.org in the US, but alas this is where they operate and theoretically a court battle could force them to cease and desist or otherwise drain their resources.
We emulated the Apple Macintosh on our Amigas using A-MAX. It wasn’t really an emulator since both the Amiga and the Macintosh used the same processor and MMU package. We bought a copy of the Apple Macintosh operating system so it was technically legal.
Some of us even ran it on Floptical drives for higher-than-native performance on an Amiga. We also bought third-party, Macintosh-compatible floppy drives with their special motorized ejection feature to load that legal copy of MacOS on our A-MAX systems.
http://crossconnect.tripod.com/AMAXHOME.HTML
Yeah, Mac “emulators” on the Amiga were more properly virtual machines/virtual environments, not emulators. You had host-specific drivers for things like the SCSI and serial and video. You only had actual emulation for things that didn’t have a proper driver, like the ADB system. That was usually patched over with an emulation of the ADB devices.