ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER MARCH 1991 ^^ AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS ABOUT TI'S NEVER ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^RELEASED SOFTWARE ----------------------------------------- P.O. Box 647 Venedocia OH 45894 December 24, 1990 Legal Department, Texas Instruments P.O. Box 655474 M/S 241 Dallas Texas 75265 Gentlemen: Attached is a copy of a letter I sent you on August 15, 1990. I received no reply to my enquiry. If I continue to have no reply by January 15, 1991, I will assume TI does not wish to defend any copyrights it may, or may not, be able to claim on the TI99/4A computer software described my the August 15 letter. I will then consider the described software to be in the public domain. Sincerely, Charles W. Good ------------------------------------------- P.O. Box 647 Venedocia OH 45894 August 15, 1990 Legal Department, Texas Instruments P.O. Box 655474 M/S 241 Dallas Texas 75265 Gentlemen: Ms. Lois Brock of your consumer services department (P.O. Box 53, Lubbock Texas 79408) in a letter dated July 9, 1990 provided your mailing address and suggested I write you concerning this matter. As the librarian of the Lima Ohio 99/4A computer user group I have been given from several sources computer software for the T.I. 99/4A computer that bears the statement "Copyright 19xx Texas Instruments" on the title screen, but which apparently was never actually sold to the public. Some of this software apparently was never sold because TI left the Home Computer market in 1983. This software is on disk, but apparently was designed to be sold as T.I. Solid State Software plug in modules. The software is, with one exception, in assembly language. Ms. Brock has no information on these titles. They are not on any of her lists of TI products. As far as she is concerned, these software titles do not exist. I would like to distribute this software for free to members of my user group and to other T.I. 99/4A home computer users and user groups. What I want to know is DOES T.I. CLAIM COPYRIGHT ON THE TITLES LISTED BELOW. If so, do you with to enforce this copyright and request that I not freely distribute the software to others. I am listing the titles as they appear on the title screen of each piece of software, together with the copyright statement exactly as it appears. TITLE^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^COPYRIGHT STATEMENT --Disk Manager 3.........Copyright Texas Instruments ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^(no specific date indicated) --Astronomy..............Copyright 1983 Texas Instruments ^^^^Minnesota Education ^^^^Computing Consortium --Lasso (tm).............Copyright 1983 Texas Instruments --ET.....................Copyright 1982 Texas Instruments --Sub Oceanic............Copyritht 1982 by Texas ^^^^by Dominic J.^Melfi^^^^^Instruments Incorporated. --Paddle Ball............Copyright 1983 T.I. --An Introduction to ^^^^Plant^Genetics.......Copyright^1894^by^Texas^Instruments --Verb Viper.............Copyright 1982 by DLM Inc.^and ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Texas Instruments --ET in His Adventure ^^^^at Sea...............Developed by Looking Glass (tm), ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Copyright^1983^Texas^Instruments. Sincerely, Charles W. Good --------------------------------------- TEXAS INSTRUMENTS 9 January 1991 Mr. Charles W. Good Box 647 Venedocia OH 45894 RE: Your letters dated August 15, 1990 and December 24, 1990 Dear Mr. Good: I first wish to apologize for our delay in responding to your letter. It seems some communications were lost at TI. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Unfortunately, we are unable to grant our consent for you to distribute the software listed in your letter and we must maintain our copyright claim. It seems that you have somehow come by a disk which contains software which was not marketed by TI and may have been under development when we discontinued the 99/4A. Some development work may have been done for TI by outside parties, as some of the copyright notices you cited indicate. Determining any possible third party rights impacting further distribution of the software would require research which we are simply not staffed to perform for a request of this nature especially as it would involve records which have been in storage for some time. Thank you for your interest in Texas Instruments. Sincerely, Amy E. Hills cc: Gary Honeycutt and Alan Daniel .PL 1