Posted By
Luca
on 2020-04-01
10:39:55
 |  Re: Conversions are illegal?
Oh well...the Nukeman's situation should be described as a bit more complex than that 
Clues are everywhere in the magazines of the era, and a good point where to start should be Elder News 01 and, most of all, Elder News 02, the latter describing the funny story of the nightime's prank call, haha! 
The diaspora between Synergy and its ex-member Nukeman basically begins about our blonde hero "selling pd-software" in Germany, if we have to copycat The Elder's words. In that time, Nukeman also moved in to spread and sell at 50DM the Csory's SIDcard, and The Elder (and probably Solder) insinuated that the hardware would consume part of the rastertime, maybe in order to boycott a potential competitor to their forthcoming SIDcard (ironically, they will be accused of the same bug, so they had to release a demo to prove that was not true, Ninja 3 Demo). What happened to the Csory's SIDcard then? I would expect to see tons of those along all the Germany, but...
The polemics about illegal C64 conversions did follow close after this initial squabble just like an addon, and that's weird to say the least, because several other C64 conversions had already been released in the past, for the delight of any Plus/4 user and with no bellringing.
Now we need to write a premise I missed. In Germany, law was quite tough against piracy, and since the early times, that was the reason for the continuous change of nicknames by various sceners, crackers especially; we also have tangible witnesses of the era, see (and read) Florasoft's history, or Musical Madness by Fusion forced to change nick from TTL due a police intervention into his house. Probably, that's the reason why I tried for years to have an interview with Fusion and he fefused any further contact. We're talking about a nation so ready to intervene on a relatively young medium (the home computer video games) to censor large sellers like Commando as well as the limited selling Bridgehead, the nation forbidden to dozens of Italian publishers free to hack original games to be sold in big packs thru the Italian newsstands, apart one, Systems, that used to released original software only and was able to release German editions of their collection Software Club.
Conversions are not legal but tolerated. Plus/4 conversions have numbers so limited that they go unnoticed, and usually most of the copyrights owners had already gone bankrupt and gone. Almost immediately, the art of conversion was seen as a tribute from fans, and not as a case of broken rights, and this view has become more evident as time passed.
About recent times, we had to circumvent some basic guidelines about the rights while creating Pets Rescue, perpetually with the doubt that he did not do enough to distance himself from the "progenitor of the genre". Somebody, on the countrary, aimed to *that* original on C64, in order to convert it as close as the father game, and it has been shut down by big-N.
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