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Reverse engineering is not a defense against infringement if the subject of reverse engineering is copyright-protected.
by curt15 10y ago
Reverse engineering is not a defense against infringement if the subject of reverse engineering is copyright-protected.
- rayiner 10y agoIt generally is. That's the whole point of clean-room reimplementation. You have one set of engineers that reverse engineers a product to develop a spec, and another set that implements the same functionality from the spec. That's kosher and has been upheld in several court cases. The trouble for doing that with Java APIs is the spec basically is the class declarations. You don't just need to "do the same thing" you need a tangible source file that has at least in part the same text.
- PeterisP 10y agoIt kind of depends - in some jurisdictions, for example, interoperability requirements is a sufficient defense against copyright infringement, i.e., if you've built your product so that interoperating with it requires [re]using copyrighted parts, then it's okay to do so (up to the extent required for interoperability) even if you explicitly forbid it. Sane laws such as that automatically prevent issues such as this Java API dispute and also things such as the attempts to block interoperability for coffee machine "pods" by requiring a copyrighted magic string and using DMCA to prevent others from using it.