Stolen from Apple (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Stolen from Apple (2004)

folklore.org

168 pointsbehnamoh44 comments

This reminds me of how the Game Boy displayed the Nintendo logo on boot up: The logo is a bitmap in the cartridge, the Game Boy displays it and only continues if the checksum matches the Nintendo logo. The point of this is that trademark should prevent the use of the Nintendo logo bitmap in unlicensed games, basically doing DRM through trademark. (It didn't really work, since companies would design their own logos such that they had the same checksum as the Nintendo logo)

That's partially incorrect.

The logo was checked in its entirety, not just the checksum, but the gameboy would read it twice: first to show it and then a second time to check for its integrity (and if it failed, the console halted). This meant you could display a custom logo and then return the unmodified logo to the console's firmware so it wouldn't halt.

I think the entire defense relied not on whether you could show the nintendo logo on boot but on whether you could embed it into your ROM. It's the same as Sega's TMSS https://segaretro.org/TradeMark_Security_System#Purpose

Oh, interesting, thanks for correcting me! Why didn't the Game Boy check the logo that it loaded to display instead of loading it twice though?

The answer might be the legality of using copyright to block functionalities, the link describes how Accolade challenged SEGA on those grounds a few years later and succeeded:

"The legality of this system was challenged in the United States by Accolade in the court case SEGA vs. Accolade, which ruled in Accolade's favor. The verdict set a precedent that copyrights do not extend to non-expressive content in software that is required by another system to be present in order for that system to run the software."

In case of Nintendo, it sounds like a unlicensed cartridge still had a choice to work on the Gameboy and NOT infringe the Nintendo trademark. But if it decided to show the Nintendo logo on bootup, it explicitly infringed on copyright...

It's a very constrained system. The startup rom is pretty small, and you want to keep thing simple so you don't mess it up. Cartridge mappers were certainly well known at the time, but they would have switched mappings based on program controlled writes/maybe reads; and the cartridge doesn't control the startup rom. Of course, it's not terribly hard to trigger based on the startup rom's access patterns; but sometimes the realistic goal is to increase the cost to do something, rather than to prevent it.

Additionally, I'd guess the goal would be to freeze after the wrong logo scrolled down, but you might not be able to read the logo back from display memory. It's also possible the boot logo scrolling was done early, and then they added the logo check later?

As someone that's getting into making modern games for the GB, after looking at pandocs etc I also wondered how Nintendo could even claim that their "logo" was in the ROM anyways, if it was xor'd or encoded somehow, the actual content of the ROM wouldn't be their logo at all, but meaningless until it was executed.

Great that when someone actually went against them that the precedent was set that Nintendo's complaints weren't valid.

no - in many legacy software languages, starting with ASM, there is a __DATA__ section and then in it, is DATA.. just bytes. You can find and dump "just the logo" in the ROM and elsewhere, with a binary search.

Oracle also does this. Connecting to their database requires (required?) you to send a poem which is copyrighted by Oracle[1]. This would, in theory, let Oracle shut any unauthorized db driver down at will.

https://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html

I wonder if that legal theory has ever been tested? I admit I'm sceptical that it would hold up in court.

I think

    Our hard work
    by these words guarded
    please don't steal

    (c) Apple Computer Inc

might have been tested in the Psystar case.

(I personally also find it quite pleasing, esp. compared to the Oracle soup which in my mind fails to resonate as a poem)

It shouldn't. I believe clauses in place to support interoperability of software would cover it.

It's not even a particularly inspiring poem!

They may not write good poetry but they'll sue the pants off you if you misuse their poems. Wait maybe I mean software not poetry

The word "Vogon" popped into my head just now...

This was the most interesting thing I read today. I remember the checksum thing from reading about it a while ago, but didn't know that vendors exploited collisions in order to display their own logo.

What I do remember though from childhood days is that the Nintendo logo could gradually become a pixelated mess when the cartridge was dirty/dusted and that it failed (or maybe refused, as I just learned) to boot when the logo was corrupted.

In that case, blowing the dust out of the cartridge usually solved the issue :)

Somewhat in the same spirit, macOS (and Rosetta 2 for Linux) won’t boot without a secret haiku given as a key during the boot process which was designed to prevent you from installing the OS on a random Intel box. (ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc)

And, at least for a while, DSMOS.kext (don’t steal Mac OS) would load a poem into memory:

Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he'd do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don't steal Mac OS!/Really, that's way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/business/worldbusiness/ap...

I find the use of the word steal to be really annoying. It’s infringement.

I think everyone understands the difference between legal terms and common vernacular there.

It doesn’t make it less antagonistic. It’s like saying a Ukrainian soldier murdered a Russian soldier. Sure some might argue that it’s murder in a technical sense but the use of that word implies something that isn’t accurate

Andy Hertzfeld is a national treasure for saving all of this tech history by taking the time to write it down. He’s got some amazing stories.

Then, not only is it great that he’s preserving history, but I love his delivery. Short, no filler, but long enough to give a little flavor.

Agreed. I invariably lose hours to Folklore every time I end up there. I previously worked for an original Mac team engineer, and he had some fascinating stories, but Hertzfeld's writing allows me to revisit those and so many more tales from that period of Apple/Silicon Valley history, and all without annoying my former boss for more stories.

"Love your country, but never trust its government."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571

https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-spar...

"Help! We're being held prisoner in a software factory!"

https://eeggs.com/items/39453.html

Also seemingly notable in this article is the comments section. While the authorship can't actually be verified, there are plenty of comments dated to 2004 from people claiming to be Apple veterans, including one from "stevewoz":

> from stevewoz on February 10, 2004 04:55:27

> I ran into Franklin at a trade show. I got rather heated since they had not only copied my design but also our PC board exactly. In front of some gathering people and press I asked why they didn't acknowledge me as their chief engineer. The Franklin president said that "yes" I was their chief engineer and I left, satisfied in that. In later thinking, I should have asked him where my paycheck was!

There are also apparently a couple of other hidden copy check images like this that are turned up in the comments section.

Reminds me of how mapmakers will include fake locations so that they can catch others who simply copy their map (not sure if this is still a thing or just happened back in the day)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

I like the story where it backfired because an actual town grew in a trap spot and took on the trap name legally without knowing the name was a planted fake.

Also fake words used in dictionaries for the same purpose

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

Atari had an 8-byte string we were supposed to embed somewhere in all of our cartridges. It was just random bits to me, but I heard later it was a message in morse code, which would probably be fun to reveal in court.

I think this practice started in 1980 or so. No idea if it was ever relied upon in a legal case.

My favorite from folklore.org: -2000 lines of code.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

Some more discussion 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5531437

My first computer was a Franklin ACE 1000 [1]. I always thought it as a compatible Apple II plus. It is great how these stories run in parallel lines: on one hand the legal aspects, on the other, how Franklin reached an extended audience and change its life, personal and professionally wise. Externalities of "piracy".

[1] http://oldcomputers.net/ace1000.html

Similar. My first computer was an unnamed Apple 2 clone from Hong Kong. There’s no way my teacher-salary parents could have afforded an authentic zone, but it turned me into an Apple fan nevertheless.

Are icons or any part of a UI copyrightable?

If not, then if e.g. my grandmother is used to MacOS, then why can't I make a Linux-y OS that looks like it so my grandmother is immediately familiar with the UI?

If early cars copyrighted the round steering wheel, then we would sort of be in an impossible situation right now.

I think that is among the most copyrightable parts of an OS.

And that doesn’t prevent you from doing your little hobby project for your grandmother at all; you just couldn’t sell or distribute it.

You can sell it to your grandmother, just don't tell anyone.

What about the steering wheel argument?

What you’re alluding to is the patent system and I can assure you it most certainly does exist and can have regressive consequences in many instances.

To the last question: Anyone who knows SteveJ can answer, he found by himself. (confirmed by his comment)

I see no twitter verified icon near that comment

Do you see twitter though?

I just hope that the notion and traditional cultural practice of "this idea is mine, therefore it cannot be yours" dies soon

once it does we can have a new digital renaissance

but if people see the phrase "original copy" and don't see an oxymoron, i have no hope

This idea could be useful to prove, for example, illegal use of a OSS-licensed library in a closed-source software.

Also, I can understand Apple's mindset on this matter: you'd be rather disgusted if someone took the code you wrote and claimed to have written it all by themselves. It's not the idea that was (trying to be) protected here, just the work behind the code.

Shows you that a mathematical proof is one thing, but a proof that makes for great court theatrics is more likely to sway a jury. They could relate to seeing this and equating it to a store security tag or suchlike still attached to a sweater.

Lmao so nobody copied it anyways, that's so apple.

I wish Apple would copy a stable os from someone themselves. Literally upgrade to Ventura today, can't log in anymore, doesn't accept my password. I'm SU mode there don't seem to be any volumes mounted or users in /Users. Now I gotta take it to our tech guys because I really just can't be bothered with apple's shit.

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