Xref: utzoo misc.legal:16971 comp.software-eng:3358 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!sugar!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: misc.legal,comp.software-eng Subject: The OTHER half... look-n-...taste? (Re: Should software ideas be protected? (Was Re: Software Copyright Law)) Keywords: European Community, copyright, reverse engineering Message-ID: <1NT2K:Exds13@ficc.uu.net> Date: 9 Apr 90 19:52:00 GMT References: <1093@goofy.UUCP> <14867@s.ms.uky.edu> <1990Apr8.003410.9841@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <4469@stpstn.UUCP> Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Followup-To: misc.legal Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 19 Everyone is rushing around flaming about the "no reverse engineering" part of the proposal, which seems to me to be just codification of existing practice, but ignoring the far more damaging part of the proposal. The ability to copyright program interfaces to packages takes the already dubious "look-n-feel" copyrights to a new and absurd height. It's been long accepted that it's OK to treat a package as a black box and figure out what it does by poking it with numbers. Actually going in and decompiling it, on the other hand, is a grey area. Some places set up software "clean rooms" where programmers known to have no knowledge of the competing product's internals do the clone, just to avoid even the appearance of piracy. This sort of thing started to fall apart with the look-n-feel suits, but it's still OK to figure out the internals, document interfaces, and so on. Nobody can keep you from writing an O/S that duplicates the UNIX system calls. Am I the only one disturbed by this part of the proposal? -- _--_|\ `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. . / \ 'U` \_.--._/ v