On Saturday, February 9, 2002 at 0.16, Greg Cook made me yell a bunch of
profanity by writing:
>That would be valid, except for the fact that the turbo grafx was not
>released outside the US, apart from a few bits in europe, but even then it
>was very limited. So unlike sega, who distributes software and hardware all
>over the world and get differet licensing deals for different regions,
>NEC/TTI/TZD have no other licensed distributors that they would be competing
>with or stepping on, therefore they should have no problem shipping overseas
>especially now that the turbo is obsolete? or maybe im missing something?
But it is valid. TTi and NEC had the rights to publish and sell the games
that they published and sold in North America only. The Japanese
publishers had Japan and Asia of course, and whatever else, was for
somebody else. Who might that be? Sodipeng? The grey market? Who knows?
I'll guarantee you who would be able to level a lawsuit if they just sold
their wares to anybody in Timbuktu though--the original copyright holder.
To put it to more specific terms, NEC had the rights to cater to the
platform for games they had licensed in North America only, when NEC
bowed out that license shifted to TTi, and when TTi folded the license
moved to TZD. Just because the license got shuffled doesn't mean the
terms were altered. And just because nobody marketed the Turbo or the PC
Engine to Australia, that doesn't mean that anybody has free reign to
extend the legal license they have in one area to that other one. It just
means that nobody ever approached the property owners (in Japan) to buy a
license to publish in your area of the world.
~Alek