Greetings!
I noticed today that Higan[0] has been added to Copr. It's a game system emulator, and it includes some binary ROM files (for example, [4]) that I have been unable to determine the license for. I have attempted to contact the author to ask where these files came from and what their license is, but did not get a reply. The Higan website claims that these files are not subject to copyright law[5], but IANAL and am not familiar with any exceptions to Copyright law that would be unique to system ROM images, so I figured I would ask the legal list.
Is Higan acceptable to be distributed by Fedora given these system ROM files that it includes?
[0] https://byuu.org/emulation/higan/ [1] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/brollylssj/higan/ [2] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/raznikk [3] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/meeuw/higan/ [4] https://gitlab.com/higan/higan/tree/master/higan/systems/Super%20Famicom.sys [5] https://byuu.org/emulation/higan/firmware
On 09/27/2018 04:06 PM, Randy Barlow wrote:
I noticed today that Higan[0] has been added to Copr. It's a game system emulator, and it includes some binary ROM files (for example, [4]) that I have been unable to determine the license for. I have attempted to contact the author to ask where these files came from and what their license is, but did not get a reply. The Higan website claims that these files are not subject to copyright law[5], but IANAL and am not familiar with any exceptions to Copyright law that would be unique to system ROM images, so I figured I would ask the legal list.
I am unaware of any reason why these binary ROM files would not be copyrightable, especially since they contain system firmware.
Is Higan acceptable to be distributed by Fedora given these system ROM files that it includes?
Based on what you've shown me, no.
~tom