Abusing copyright strings to trick SW into thinking it's running competitor's PC
17 comments
·June 26, 2025ndriscoll
hedora
In general, if the thing is purely functional (like the logo), then it can’t be copyrighted and is not a trademark.
APIs are (generally…) not copyrightable for similar reasons.
null
somat
See also: the game boy nintendo logo check.
https://knight.sc/reverse%20engineering/2018/11/19/game-boy-...
"The idea was that if you were an unlicensed Nintendo developer and you produced an unlicensed game you would have to reproduce Nintendos logo which is a registered trademark. This would in turn allow Nintendo to manually enforce anti-piracy measures through litigation."
josephcsible
Why didn't that kind of abuse result in Nintendo's trademark being voided by the functionality doctrine like it did for GP's example?
marginalia_nu
Microsoft would have experience with that
mslansn
Friendly reminder that the AARD code never shipped.
HankB99
It shipped in the release version but was disabled according to a note on Wikipedia.
> Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte.
IIRC it did manage to make it into the PCs of some users - testers and early adopters?
/pedant
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye
it absolutely shipped in the beta...
smileybarry
Betas at the time were physical and tightly controlled, not a download or a toggle. I wouldn’t really call it “shipped”.
p_ing
"Shipped" means release to manufacturing (in that era).
a3w
Expected this to be about LLMs. Soon it will be, since negation is a hard concept to comprehend for humans, too?
boomlinde
See also Sega v Accolade.
Sega had implemented a measure to discourage unlicensed games for the Genesis/Megadrive. Upon boot, the console would ensure that the string "SEGA" was present at a certain memory location and then display that string as part of a longer message to the user asserting that the game was produced under license from [string]. The idea was that circumventing this would constitute trademark infringement.
Accolade reverse engineered and circumvented it. Sega sued for trademark infringement. Accolade eventually won. The whole thing only harmed consumers since by the time Sega implemented the measure there were already a bunch of games, both licensed and unlicensed, that did not pass the check.
jordemort
30 years on and still unwilling to name the actual companies involved. I get that discretion is a thing but this feels like how history becomes folklore.
tallytarik
And nowadays we have
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36andrewoneone
Dell and HP did similar, albeit slightly more complicated, checks for windows licensing back in the 2000’s on their Windows installation media.
tiahura
I can’t imagine the work required to get plug and play going on on old isa hardware. That 95 team was pretty awesome.
Along similar lines, the Sega Genesis required games to trigger a routine in the console to show "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises LTD." at bootup time, attempting to use trademark law to force game publishers to pay for a license from Sega to build games for the console. The court ruled that copying the code to trigger the message was not copyright infringement and the message itself was not trademark infringement because Sega's own design forced those things to make the hardware work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade