Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!motcsd!xdos!doug From: doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: PD or Shareware Copyrights Summary: One small point that wasn't covered... Message-ID: <404@xdos.UUCP> Date: 1 Jul 89 18:16:34 GMT References: <18195@louie.udel.EDU> <18280@louie.udel.EDU> <18366@louie.udel.EDU> <14731@watdragon.waterloo.edu> Reply-To: doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt) Organization: Hunter Systems, Mountain View CA (Silicon Valley) Lines: 47 In article <14731@watdragon.waterloo.edu> jyegiguere@lion.waterloo.edu (Eric Giguere) writes: > >Actually reverse-engineering isn't sufficient. A reverse-engineered program >is an original program and hence is covered by copyright law. > [...] Unfortunately, these days the whole concept of >reverse-engineering [...] is being increasingly muddied by >so called "look-and-feel" copyrights and patents. Nice article. One point no one has covered directly is the meaning of "reverse-engineering". If I do a work-alike of something, without basing the implementation on the source *or* binary of the original, then until recently that was considered good enough to be original work. (As Eric points out, look and feel lawsuits have brought even that into question.) But the important point I wanted to bring out is that if you "reverse- engineer" something by, say, disassembling it, studying the result, and writing a new program based on the disassembly, then you have definitely created a derived work, and the copyright on it belongs to the holder of the original copyright. This is well tested in the courts, although as with any issue there are questions about to what degree the derivative was based on the original. But the general principle is quite similar to translation of a book into another language. If it is a faithful translation, then the new version is a derived work. This point is important to my company. We create faithful translations of 8086 programs into 68020/80836/88000/etc programs. The result is still owned by the copyright holder of the original program, which means that we can either obtain a distribution license from them, or else simply sell the *translator*. Without a license, we cannot sell the translation itself. BTW we're doing both: obtaining distribution license from some companies, licensing our translator to some other s/w houses, and additionally selling the translator to end users to cover the rest of the cases. (The 1978 copyright law allows purchasers of s/w to make copies as necessary for normal use, so they can legally use our translator to e.g. run Lotus 123 on a Sun so long as they don't use the original on a PC, which would presumably violate their single cpu license.) Doug -- Doug Merritt {pyramid,apple}!xdos!doug Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow Professional Wildeyed Visionary