Reply 20 of 40, by canadacow
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Ok... now I think I can comment. Today it was finally pointed out to me that the Roland's ROM is a restored work. Per a bill signed into law by Clinton, works that had fallen into the public domain (for whatever reason, including notice omission) but were still copyrighted elsewhere (in this case, Japan) had their rights restored to the original owners. The last remaining bit of contention is the release date of the ROM. If the ROM/MT-32 was released to the United States before or at the same time it was in Japan, then the ROM is still in the public domain. On the other hand, if the ROM/MT-32 was available for more than a month in Japan before it was available in the states, it's a restored work. If only Roland had pointed this out to me in the first place. I did not seek to antagonize Roland in the first place, hence the reason I contacted them first in good faith. Most likely though, the ROM is indeed a restored work, and as such, I fully intend to respect Roland's rights and not infringe on any of their property. This means that I will most definately cancel the project.
Even if Roland is ok with me going ahead with an emulator based on a similar public domain patch set (Roland is still considering their position on this), it will take a lot to convince me to pickup the project simply because I was about ready to retire before all this stuff happened. People were complaining about pointless things and I didn't really feel like my work was being appreciated anyway. (No, I didn't want people to bow down at my feet, I simply wanted more coding and techincal support than I was receiving.) Using an unauthentic patch set will offset the sound and more or less defeat the purpose of the emulator to begin with (particularlly with regard to percussion sounds).
So that's all she wrote folks. I'll keep everyone posted if anything else develops.
Oh, and Snover, if in the end it appears that Roland indeed retains the copyright on the sounds (which is most likely the case) then this wouldn't have been a "SLAPP" suit in the true sense of the definition, since Roland would have a real point and a real case.