According to this [0] reddit post, the copyright on the C64 ROMs is currently owned by a company called Cloanto [1], whose premier product is a COM/ActiveX currency converter, like it's 1999.
Michael Battilana (Cloanto) is to Commodore as Brewster Kahle is to Archive.org
He's genuinely tried to preserve the history of Commodore (Amiga in particular) and make it available to everyone, in Cloanto's Amiga Forever and C64 Forever packages. I understand there's no profit from this; it's all fan work under the guise of commercial offerings.
If Cloanto is holding on to the copyrights, it's for good reason. Following the demise of Commodore, there has been non-stop conflict between subsequent owners of various parts of the IP and copyrights. At least Cloanto is committed to preserving the Commodore legacy - the company has been around since the 80s, and has produced some flagship Amiga software.
I have known Michael personally for almost a quarter of a century now. Boy, does time fly...
You might say I am biased, but I can vouch for his genuine work to preserve the history of computing, not just Commodore or Amiga. For example, I think he bid on an Cray that the DoE was getting rid of and had to get it shipped to Italy for his computer museum project. Which wasn't cheap, because the thing weighted a ton. Multiple ones, actually.
Several of his projects were definitely not for the money, like his collaboration with a research team at University of Bologna to create drop-in replacements for narrator.device and/or translator.library that could convert Italian text to speech. Commodore Italy donated a bunch of machines to the team. This was in the context of Amiga software for people with severe disabilities, which wasn't a cash cow.
Which is also funny, because in 1997 Michael was the one in the audience that challenged a bit Richard Stallman on software economics, during the latter's talk at the Italian Amiga developer conference. He got RMS to say that, no, professional software developers like him were not necessarily entitled to make more money than a waiter. Quite a few of us among the hundreds that witnessed it still remember the exchange.
I haven't followed the latest controversies, but I do agree that his is nothing but fan work.
I guess my main concern would be his bus factor. What guarantees are there that his estate will provide the same gentleman's agreement to focus on archiving rather a money grab?
No guarantees, although knowing how careful he is with legal issues (see how he might have involuntarily started the GIF wars, by asking Unisys where to send them money for a patent license), I wouldn't be surprised if he already thought of that. I'm sure I'd first knock on wood if he read your comment, though.
So if cloanto has the copyright on Commodore's IP, if you are such a benevolent commodore historian why don't you publicly release everything under an open source license? This is the best way to conserve it.
Is there not a good reference for doing a clean room implementation? These guys seem to be trying to figure it out from base principals and are struggling. Certainly someone must have written a book or something by now.
I dunno, man? I think their justification sounds pretty sensible: approx 100% of qualified C64 developers will have spent a good deal of time poring over the original code, so there's a very good chance that any supposedly clean room implementation will, legally speaking, be anything but. Hence all the extra palaver.
(The only questionaible thing in my view is why they aren't using 64tass.)
They can be used in emulators and replaced on C64 boards that had the ROMs burn out. This reminds me of the Amiga ROM Kickstart that AROS made for Amiga 68K units o run AROS in emulators or real Amigas.
I see a lot of projects like this in Europe. I guess their IP laws are slacker than the USA?
Yeah, their argument that an "implied right" to copyrighted materials arises just because it's widely infringed and the copyright holder hasn't sued anybody, seems fishy. I think they are confused with trademarks. Any citations of actual legal cases would be welcome.
This is only an aside to their actual reverse engineering work, but still.
That whole section should just be deleted as IANAL speculation. If they're not sure about it then it's just noise. If they were sure about it, the project would be redundant.
Anyway, it sounds like a fun project.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/6d8ss0/who_owns_the_co...
[1] https://cloanto.com/