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)
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.
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 :)
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
