Abusing copyright strings to trick SW into thinking it's running competitor's PC | Hacker News Reader

Abusing copyright strings to trick SW into thinking it's running competitor's PC

devblogs.microsoft.com

69 pointsmastazi19 comments

Along similar lines, the Sega Genesis required games to trigger a routine in the console to show "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises LTD." at bootup time, attempting to use trademark law to force game publishers to pay for a license from Sega to build games for the console. The court ruled that copying the code to trigger the message was not copyright infringement and the message itself was not trademark infringement because Sega's own design forced those things to make the hardware work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

In general, if the thing is purely functional (like the logo), then it can’t be copyrighted and is not a trademark.

APIs are (generally…) not copyrightable for similar reasons.

See also: the game boy nintendo logo check.

https://knight.sc/reverse%20engineering/2018/11/19/game-boy-...

"The idea was that if you were an unlicensed Nintendo developer and you produced an unlicensed game you would have to reproduce Nintendos logo which is a registered trademark. This would in turn allow Nintendo to manually enforce anti-piracy measures through litigation."

Why didn't that kind of abuse result in Nintendo's trademark being voided by the functionality doctrine like it did for GP's example?

First, I don't think sega's trademark was voided, it is more like "It is not a violation of a companies trademark to use it when they require using it to access the device." That is, the registered trademark still protects everything else it is intended to protect.

Second, that was the US ruling, I have no idea of how the rest of the world, specifically japan, views using a trademark like this. I do know japan is weirdly(at least to US sensibility) strict about copyright and trademark law.

So it was an attempt by Nintendo(and Sega) to have a legal crowbar to use to control third party use of their system. In the US it was ruled that this would not work for Sega. So Nintendo probably never used it for that purpose (in the US)

I can understand why they would expect copying the code to be a copyright trap, but I'm confused why they expected merely displaying the message to be a copyright trap at all. Why world it be copyright infringement to falsely advertise the vendor? To my layman ears that sounds like claiming that lying about parking somewhere would constitute a parking violation, which makes no sense. If anything, wouldn't it be a trademark violation or false advertisement or something else?

I think the goal was force venders to copy Sega’s code for doing the API call and that triggered the screen to display a trademark in order to unlock the console for use. So they were hoping to trigger several different sorts of legal issues, to cover more countries differing legal codes and restrictions.

Microsoft would have experience with that

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

Friendly reminder that the AARD code never shipped.

It shipped in the release version but was disabled according to a note on Wikipedia.

> Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte.

IIRC it did manage to make it into the PCs of some users - testers and early adopters?

/pedant

it absolutely shipped in the beta...

Betas at the time were physical and tightly controlled, not a download or a toggle. I wouldn’t really call it “shipped”.

"Shipped" means release to manufacturing (in that era).

30 years on and still unwilling to name the actual companies involved. I get that discretion is a thing but this feels like how history becomes folklore.

I can’t imagine the work required to get plug and play going on on old isa hardware. That 95 team was pretty awesome.

And nowadays we have

  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36