3 ms·

Do you have some more details how it would be copyright infringing? I can't see what part of an implementation would be direct copied work, unless it's byte seq

• shakna 6y ago
  This is a very, very complex question. To start of with, the belief that only plagiarised work can be copyright infringing is incorrect, at least when it comes to Australia. A lot of reverse-engineering work is not done inside Australian borders, because the current interpretations of copyright law aren't favourable (as well as some other related laws). For example, if there exists a proprietary protocol, then the protocol itself may fall under copyright, and simply making a tool that speaks to that protocol may be considered infringing. This is because our copyright laws, or rather the interpretations of them, speak to the 'substance' of the tool being copyrighted, rather than the work itself. (And yes - copying a painting copies the 'substance' and can run afoul of our insane copyright regulations. Depending on how much the original artist cares.) As I said before, vague and far-reaching. And the courts have never been consistent in the way they hand down their case-by-case judgements. Australia is not well known for intelligent tech laws. Iterating public IDs can be considered hacking, forcing a secret backdoor isn't considered a systemic security weakness, etc.