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The Game Boy wouldn't run a game unless the cart sent it the Nintendo loading screen - a clever legal ploy that meant unofficial games were breaking copyright laws simply by replicating the logo.

Diabolical! I wonder if Nintendo ever used this one in the courts.

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Famously, Argonaut impressed Nintendo by circumventing this copy protection. The gameboy actually reads the contents of the ROM twice. Once to check that all the data is correct and again to display on the screen. Argonaut just used a capacitor which was set up to charge at the right rate to switch between ROMs and the logo on the screen was their company's logo. It ended up leading to them designing the FX-1 chip for the SNES.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-04-born-slippy-the...

Sega v. Accolade[0] is an interesting take on the same issue.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

Later, Lexmark tried the same thing with printer cartridge DRM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v.....

Microsoft did the same with the Xbox360 HDD's (atleast at the birth of the console, I know later in the consoles life MS removed the restriction on using USB Hard drives with the console). The hard drive contained a "security sector" which contained the MS Logo in PNG format (made with Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 on the 19th of July 2005).

I'm not sure if anyone at MS ever confirmed it but we presumed MS had put it there so that if anyone was found selling unofficial hard drives then you could of been found to be breaking copyright laws because you needed to include the Microsoft logo in the hard drives you were selling for them to work on the 360.

We still rely on stuff like this. For example, just recently GNU Emacs requires modules to export a symbol called PLUGIN_IS_GPL_COMPATIBLE in order to enforce the GPL. Code is law, it seems. You would have to do something like modify and ship Emacs without this requirement as well as your plugin and then try to argue that the combination doesn't violate the GPL, which lawyers like Eben Moglen currently believe would not be viewed favourably by a judge.

Is it illegal to export a variable named PLUGIN_IS_GPL_COMPATIBLE but not actually being compatible? There is a law for variables names?

It shows willful infringement, I think, or something like it. Exporting the variable indicates intent of GPL compatibility. It's a bit like signing "I agree". If you're nevertheless infringing on the GPL despite writing in your code that you did not, lawyers think that judges would not look favourably upon your case.

> There is a law for variables names?

It's a funny thing that programmers try to view the law as a programming language (and even sometimes try to work around it that way, such as for example by writing GPL wrappers). Judges and juries don't care so much about that but kind of detail, but about what people declare and what they do in regards to the legal text. Also, it's all very subjective and slightly unpredictable.

In the original Game Genie article, you see that they were doing one kind of legal workaround that is known to work: clean-room reverse engineering. That's why one team would come up with the codes and without telling details to the other guy they would ask him to test the code.

A couple of unofficial cartridges required you to put an official cartridge into them similar to a Game Genie, which they'd use to satisfy the interlock mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)

Super Noah's Arc 3D on the SNES did this.

It actually recently showed up on Steam for $5 for some reason. It runs on all platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, and by extension most of the UNIXes that can emulate one of the three), and has generally good reviews, if you're interested.

They were not breaking copyright law at all. Interoperability is not a copyright violation. They were not breaking trademark either, showing a picture of a trademark is not illegal, unless it causes confusion in the mind of the corner. but that would be avoided by adding a simple disclaimer when shipping a cartridge or loading a game.

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