Re: Am I stupid?

On Sep 1, 2007, at 4:36 PM, dotline7 wrote:

> Please explain to me who has rights to Newton soft and hardware?  
> When it
> will expire, the patent?
>
> Is it so that after some time the content of the Newton will be  
> public,
> content "written" or constructed by Apple?

Without knowing the contracts that were made between Newton Inc and  
Apple Computers Inc at that time, it is still pretty safe to say that  
Apple holds the copyright to all Newton hardware and to all software  
that came installed on the Newton at time of delivery. In addition to  
the copyrights, there were also various patents filed regarding  
technology that was first used in the Newton (one for example  
regarding power saving, but I don't have the link handy right now).

I don't know when any of these rights expire, but I am sure that it  
will not be within my lifetime. Even if they did, Newton hardware  
features are pretty meaningless when compared to todays available  
hardware. And regarding the software, even if it was public domain,  
we still would not own the source code and were at the same point at  
which we are now.

The only thing different would be, that we would not require a ROM to  
run the Einstein emulator, but simply add the ROM as part of the  
package.