Video Transcript

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Hey, Gary Schuster with Innovation Cafe, and I want to talk with you about why I am not working at Apple — and why I didn’t get stock back when Apple was a tiny little company — for working for them. The reason is I was afraid of copyright.

So what happened: I was in 8th grade and I had an Apple IIe computer, and I disassembled the operating system, made massive changes to it in 6502 assembler, and loved the changes. It made it so much easier to use. But I couldn’t figure out whether it was legal to have done what I did.

Now I knew for sure if I sold the operating system as modified, it would be illegal. But I didn’t understand copyright law very well. It turns out that was probably a derivative work, but I should still have sent it to Apple and asked them, “Hey, are you interested?” But I was afraid that I had already violated copyright just by looking at it.

Turns out it wasn’t true then — it may be true now. There’s some provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that we’ll discuss another time. In the meantime, that’s why they didn’t get to see my work.