[MUD-Dev] DCMA -- another weapon in the fight against Emulators

[Eric Rhea]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Frank Crowell wrote:

> Once again the DCMA is being dragged out as a weapon against an
> emulator project. This time it's Blizzard against Bnet. I suppose
> the courts are no longer supporting emulator and reverse
> engineering projects.  I remember at time when the semiconductor
> companies were routinely "reverse engineering" each other.  The
> only time you could catch the other side was if you put in dummy
> circuits and then saw it reproduced in another company's chip.
> The usually practice -- to speed up reverse engineering -- was to
> steal the tape with the designs or even better still the lithos.

Has anyone demonstrated that emulators are actually harmful to these
businesses? If anything, from where I'm standing on this side of the
fence, it looks as if emulators have nill impact or are actually
harmful to the industry as a whole. Aren't these the future
developers and peers of "the family" they are putting down?

Or perhaps squashing emulation is a way to qwell competition..

Mr. Evil rubs his hands together. "Yes, we'll stifle competition
here by making it illegal for them to come up with /our/ ideas. And
then, once we've locked up all these good ideas we'll charge
them. We'll charge them one biilliiiooon dollars!"
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