What exactly is the legal status of GEMS?
Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 3:41 am
We've got all sorts of versions of GEMS leaked out there now - enough basically for it to be reverse engineered and usable. I know r57shell is working on some GEMS tools & his GEMS player, ValleyBell has some GEMS tools, and I am working on a MIDI to GEMS sequence utility myself (that may get finished sometime this century).
Here's what I don't know though: what is the legal status of using GEMS in your own work? There's not a lot of documentation to back this up.
The only copyright notices listed are in the code itself. Nothing in the resulting binary (I don't know if this is relevant). Just a simple (C) Sega of America. The documentation has no mention of copyrights or licensing at all. How did developers get GEMS? Was there a licensing fee? We would assume they paid for the GEMS hardware... did they even bother charging for the driver, or did they just put it on floppies/an FTP somewhere assuming it would be useless to anyone who didn't pay for the hardware? If there was a licensing fee, was it per cartridge, or a one time fee, or per title? On top of this, many games use GEMS with some modifications. So did the developer actually buy the rights to the code? No limitations on usage are documented anywhere, either.
I suspect the reality was that being the comparatively earlier days of game development, Sega/Technopop probably didn't assume they could charge lots of money for it like a modern piece of middleware and that GEMS was probably de facto "free" with the hardware. It was used by enough American developers that my assumption is that the GEMS source code probably floated around a lot from developer to developer as there are so many different little permutations of it in the wild.
Where does this leave us now, though? I'm sure the copyright is still valid, if it was valid in the first place...maybe. Sega of America doesn't "exist" any more, right? Would it be tied up with some rights holder? Or most importantly, it was used in a "commercial" homebrew production--would anyone CARE?
Here's what I don't know though: what is the legal status of using GEMS in your own work? There's not a lot of documentation to back this up.
The only copyright notices listed are in the code itself. Nothing in the resulting binary (I don't know if this is relevant). Just a simple (C) Sega of America. The documentation has no mention of copyrights or licensing at all. How did developers get GEMS? Was there a licensing fee? We would assume they paid for the GEMS hardware... did they even bother charging for the driver, or did they just put it on floppies/an FTP somewhere assuming it would be useless to anyone who didn't pay for the hardware? If there was a licensing fee, was it per cartridge, or a one time fee, or per title? On top of this, many games use GEMS with some modifications. So did the developer actually buy the rights to the code? No limitations on usage are documented anywhere, either.
I suspect the reality was that being the comparatively earlier days of game development, Sega/Technopop probably didn't assume they could charge lots of money for it like a modern piece of middleware and that GEMS was probably de facto "free" with the hardware. It was used by enough American developers that my assumption is that the GEMS source code probably floated around a lot from developer to developer as there are so many different little permutations of it in the wild.
Where does this leave us now, though? I'm sure the copyright is still valid, if it was valid in the first place...maybe. Sega of America doesn't "exist" any more, right? Would it be tied up with some rights holder? Or most importantly, it was used in a "commercial" homebrew production--would anyone CARE?