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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!News.LiveNet.Net!beast From: jsloan@LiveNet.Net (Jim Sloan) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX) Date: Wed, 08 May 96 05:27:55 GMT Organization: LiveNet, Inc. Lines: 70 Message-ID: <4mpbdq$d80@PaperBoy.LiveNet.Net> References: <NELSON.96Apr15010553@ns.crynwr.com> <31866E12.67FD83BE@lambert.org> <4m8k99$o12@master.di.fc.ul.pt> <318978E8.14B8@vfr.interceptor.com> <4mmhcj$dfr@news1.halcyon.com> <31901BFD.7BAC@vfr.interceptor.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: blue.livenet.net X-Newsreader: News Xpress 2.0 Beta #0 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:23329 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:936 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3691 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3529 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:18963 comp.os.linux.advocacy:48492 In article <31901BFD.7BAC@vfr.interceptor.com>, thumper@vfr.interceptor.com wrote: >Tim Smith wrote: >> >> Thumper! <thumper@vfr.interceptor.com> wrote: >> >Even if you own the product, it is ILLEGAL for you to use that information > to >> >engineer your own product, whether it be compatible or not (ie, using the >> >information to learn from is illegal as well). >> >> [I'm assuming United States law in this posting] >> >> In general, this is incorrect. If you don't want someone to be able to >> legally reverse engineer your product, you've got to get them to >> contractually agree to not reverse engineer it. For non-software >> products, there is not much you can do to stop reverse engineering, >> except get patents to cover the essentials of your product, or make >> sure that you are careful who you sell to. If it's going to be a mass >> marketed product that any schmoe can go and buy at the supermarket or >> hardware store, patents are about the only protection you can hope >> for. > >That would sadly imply that software is unprotectable. Commercial software, > GNU, >GPL, etc, are meaningless, because it's therefore legal to take someone's > product, >take it apart to see how it works, and then derive your own work partially, or > even >entirely, from that work, and proceed to legally sell your own work. That > would >also apply to hardware as well; just take apart an Intel CPU, make a copy, and >build your own. After all, why should patents offer protection that copyright >doesn't? > >Consider this: a screenwirter writes a movie. Someone else takes his script, >reads the scripts, makes changes, and produces the movie. Is the screenwriter >entitled to anything? >-- >Thumper! Leporidae Extraordinhare >thumper@vfr.interceptor.com http://www.interceptor.com/~thumper > "Life is to achieve the impossible" If you wrote a book about a canoe trip down a river and wrote as seen through your eyes on the canoe trip and i saw the manuscript and decided to rewrite it as someone else watching you taking the canoe trip, then the works are two different works. An IDEA cannot be patented or copyrighted, only the actual works can be. In software, all there has to be is sufficient enough code that is the same as the original code that shows it was not original code to break copyright laws. On the other hand, if I take a piece of software, play with it to see how it works, look at the underlying structures and figure it out without any code, I can most definitely write software to that is compatible with the original software legally. If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be FoxPro, which, in essence, reverse engineered dBase and wrote their own DBMS that ran dBase code and wrote to dBase files and indexes. This is common practice in the software industry. Phoenix did it with BIOS code from IBM's original BIOS, but they did it in what is called "CLEAN ROOM" reverse engineering. They had engineers who broke down the code, wrote down what it did (no code, just how it performed), gave the specs to another set of engineers who developed the code to perform the exact same function. I could site many examples of this in the software, hardware, movie, music, and literary industries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jim Sloan jsloan@livenet.net Vice President LiveNet, Inc. 413 Davis St. Suite 106 Full Service Internet Provider Virginia Beach VA 23462 Dialup and dedicated connections Ph: 804-499-9328 Virtual Web, Email, and FTP hosting http://www.livenet.net info@livenet.net webmaster@livenet.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------