4 ms·
"intellectual property" That's a really muddy term. How exactly can you protect a protocol? Trade secret? Patents? Copyright shouldn't apply if it's a reimple
by johkra 15y ago
"intellectual property"
That's a really muddy term. How exactly can you protect a protocol? Trade secret? Patents?
Copyright shouldn't apply if it's a reimplementation.
Edit: s/since/if/
- michael_dorfman 15y agoThe easiest way to is to restrict the right to reverse-engineer in the Terms of Service of the Skype client (which he needs to use, in order to have something to reverse engineer.)
- JoshTriplett 15y agoTerms of Service don't necessarily have any legal force, and many jurisdictions have legal protections for the right to reverse-engineer, particularly for interoperability purposes.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- JoshTriplett 15y agoWhile copyright wouldn't apply to an independent reimplementation, the article included links to decompiled versions of the Skype binaries, which would definitely fall under Skype's copyrights. Nothing wrong with using those decompiled binaries to reverse-engineer and document the Skype protocol, and I hope this produces useful results there, but that doesn't make it OK to directly redistribute the decompiled binaries.