Hyperkin’s Retron5 License Violations :P

[Gunstar Green]

I love the Retron 5 but there's no sense in defending Hyperkin's actions. There should be some form of restitution for this.

[Ziggy]

To play devil's advocate... the automobile had a patent on it until a gentleman named Henry Ford said screw that & ran with an existing invention in his own, very similar direction, using many of the exact same designs. He won in court.

How does that compare to Hyperkin? Is Hyperkin suppose to be Ford?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associatio ... ufacturers

ALAM was a greedy organization that chose who could make cars, who couldn't, and collected ridiculous royalties. When Ford was denied a license, he identified that ALAM was evil and reasoned that something should be done. Ford only wanted the automobile to be affordable for everyone, not just a select few.

Hyperkin, apparently, used emulators in their Retron5 that were freely available on the internet. If YOU spent countless hours coding something, with no intent of ever charging for it, only to have some company profit from it... wouldn't you be pissed? It's not at all the same as what Ford did.

[Tanooki]

It's not hard to draw a comparison, but you could do it with a lot.

Ford created the assembly line setup for the Model T, he did not invent the car and used other peoples work to make the cars.
Hyperkin created a chinese assembly line setup for the R5, they did not invent the emulators and used other peoples work to make the R5.

See not hard.

[Opa Opa]

My question is: Whoever has the rights to the code, or whatever, did they have any plans to release a piece of hardware to the community?

10 quadrillion percent chance of "No".

Questionable company takes legally dubious code to create and sell unofficial hardware not originally supported by the game manufacturers.

Are we going to make a big deal out of the GB Boy next?

[Tanooki]

Well you know with that interesting question about the GB Boy, never forget the K1 or the K101 that came out more recently. It looks everything like a GBA SP, but it's a fake, and it mostly gets everything right but has a few snags with it (like the retron5.)

http://gbatemp.net/threads/k101-revo-of ... ew.339019/

NES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gamegear, Master System, and PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16 systems all emulated on it. It appears for many of them they're loopy/flubbas 'advance' line of emulators which probably don't have permission either.

[nightrnr]

Hyperkin, apparently, used emulators in their Retron5 that were freely available on the internet. If YOU spent countless hours coding something, with no intent of ever charging for it, only to have some company profit from it... wouldn't you be pissed? It's not at all the same as what Ford did.

So then, if they had every user download/install the emulators separately (not part of the purchase price), would there not be a problem?

If so, it seems like it would have been an easy issue to avoid.

[Cronozilla]

This comes down entirely to what licenses were given from the copyright holders that Hyperkin actually used in the system.

There's nothing wrong with writing an emulator. It's entirely legal and ethical to virtualize hardware.

It is also not inherently illegal to sell someone's open source software. But there's, generally, caveats. Like, disclosure and availability.

A lot of people whom write software and use various OSS licenses are actually misusing them.

You cannot, in many of them, restrict how the software can be used ... even for commercial application. (If they do this, their use of the license would be invalidated. Which would essentially mean, they threw code out to the net with no stipulations. If they claimed copyright in the source files, they'd still have that.)

But there are stipulations. If your software is intertwined (i.e. you modified the OSS code) that has to be made available to people the binaries were distributed to. However, if your software is abstracted out (i.e. your code calls external OSS code), you do not have to disclose your proprietary work.

Some of the emulators used do not have OSS licenses, such as SNES 9x. It just flat out claims how it can be used.

Hyperkin, obviously, ignored a lot of this and saw it all as free to use software, which it isn't.

In the cases of protected software, they should have contacted those individuals to license it for their product. However, in the cases of software that have an OSS licenses already, they didn't need to make any deals. That software already has a license, and that license is what they need to adhere to. They did violate that in many instances.

There's several ways around all of this. They could sell the Retron 5 without the emulator code being physically present in the system with instructions on which files they need to go grab, or even making an update that downloads them. It could even open the system up to allowing you to choose whatever emulator engine you want.

More than likely, they'll have to modify the system to adhere to all existing open licenses in every way possible. With the protected stuff, they'd be at the mercy of the copyright holders.

[Jagosaurus]

Ziggy.... take your drama to the other boards discussing this topic you'd fit in nicely. Notice the "to play devil's advocate" verbiage... you then proceed to wiki a topic I know a lot about & act like an IP attorney. I was starting a discussion... you know... the purpose of online message boards.

[pepharytheworm]

Ziggy.... take your drama to the other boards discussing this topic you'd fit in nicely. Notice the "to play devil's advocate" verbiage... you then proceed to wiki a topic I know a lot about & act like an IP attorney. I was starting a discussion... you know... the purpose of online message boards.

How was his response not furthering the discussion? It seems you took personally offense.

[marurun]

Questionable company takes legally dubious code to create and sell unofficial hardware not originally supported by the game manufacturers.

I'm gonna need to see some evidence that the specific code they ripped off is somehow legally dubious, otherwise I have to call BS. Reverse engineering is protected in the US by law, Tanooki's VBA example (the truth of which I cannot evaluate) notwithstanding.