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There is no copyright infringement when an engineer studies a competitors product and pretends that their design is independent? I don't know if this is a real

by 99_00 5y ago

There is no copyright infringement when an engineer studies a competitors product and pretends that their design is independent? I don't know if this is a real thing or not (I can see it being real in smaller companies, but incompetent when it comes to these things so what do I know), but that's the case described.

allturtles 5y ago
Copyright is the exclusive right to a particular creative expression, traditionally text. If you recreate the same functionality as another program without copying its text, there is no copyright violation. There may be patent infringement, but that's another matter.
BaseballPhysics 5y ago
> There is no copyright infringement when an engineer studies a competitors product and pretends that their design is independent? So long as no actual code was copied, no, there isn't. An independent re-implementation of an API/interface/whatever for the purpose of interoperability is perfectly legal. This explains the clean-room approach, as it ensures that the developer re-implementing the functionality has absolutely no access to the original code, thus making it impossible for them to engage in copyright infringement (BTW, if you want to watch a fantastic dramatization of this, go watch Halt and Catch Fire. I love the show for a lot of reasons, but their dramatization of the reverse engineering of the PC BIOS was just... so good). This is why, for example, LibreOffice can go ahead and implement their own Word doc implementation without worrying about Microsoft suing the pants off of them. It's also why Wine is perfectly legal (though not without controversy when developers have tried to take shortcuts). Heck, we wouldn't have AMD if this type of thing was illegal! AMD got into the microprocessor market by, yup, reverse engineering the Intel 8080 and cloning it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am9080 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am9080 > It was originally produced without license as a clone of the Intel 8080, reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey and Jay Kumar by photographing an early Intel chip and developing a schematic and logic diagrams from the images.
- asdff 5y ago
  So how come you can independently re implement an API but if you try and do that with a hard good and slap a ford mustang badge you reimplemented independently onto it you get sued? Further more this is software. Why can't the team looking at the source code just write up the new code rather than write up a spec? Seems like such a useless performance considering you could just run a diff or something to catch plaigerism.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Because if you basically just rename variables and some other lazy obfuscations, it's still a copyright violation. This isn't about efficiency. It's about using a process that's relatively resistant to legal challenge.
  - BaseballPhysics 5y ago
    > do that with a hard good and slap a ford mustang badge you reimplemented independently onto it you get sued? Ah, now we're getting into a completely different forms of IP protection. The Ford Mustang badge is a protected trademark, so you're not allowed to use it without their permission. The car itself might also contain patented technical or design elements that you may not be allowed to duplicate without a license. Broadly there's four classes of IP protection out there: copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. This discussion vis a vis reverse engineering is primarily centered around copyright protections. As for the rest of your comment, check out my other reply where I hopefully clarified things.
lostgame 5y ago
A great example of this would be called an emulator, and I'd argue that, yes - those are completely independent designs. So does the law. :)
pessimizer 5y ago
They don't pretend the design is independent, they explicitly have studied the design. The implementation is independent, because they have not studied the code. The code is what is protected by copyright. The design would be in the realm of patents.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  On the last point, it's interesting to note that, at the time the IBM BIOS was being reverse engineered by various parties (around 1981/82), software patents were still not particularly well established. It wasn't until the Federal Circuit was established in '82 that there was a consistent treatment of software patent litigation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent#United_States One has to wonder if, today, the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS would be possible, given the likelihood that IBM would've patented their implementation.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Interesting point. We partially originally had software licensing in the IBM System/360 days because IBM was skeptical about how useful software patents were as a means of IP protection.

by 99_00 5y ago

allturtles 5y ago

Copyright is the exclusive right to a particular creative expression, traditionally text. If you recreate the same functionality as another program without copying its text, there is no copyright violation. There may be patent infringement, but that's another matter.

BaseballPhysics 5y ago

> There is no copyright infringement when an engineer studies a competitors product and pretends that their design is independent? So long as no actual code was copied, no, there isn't. An independent re-implementation of an API/interface/whatever for the purpose of interoperability is perfectly legal. This explains the clean-room approach, as it ensures that the developer re-implementing the functionality has absolutely no access to the original code, thus making it impossible for them to engage in copyright infringement (BTW, if you want to watch a fantastic dramatization of this, go watch Halt and Catch Fire. I love the show for a lot of reasons, but their dramatization of the reverse engineering of the PC BIOS was just... so good). This is why, for example, LibreOffice can go ahead and implement their own Word doc implementation without worrying about Microsoft suing the pants off of them. It's also why Wine is perfectly legal (though not without controversy when developers have tried to take shortcuts). Heck, we wouldn't have AMD if this type of thing was illegal! AMD got into the microprocessor market by, yup, reverse engineering the Intel 8080 and cloning it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am9080 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am9080 > It was originally produced without license as a clone of the Intel 8080, reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey and Jay Kumar by photographing an early Intel chip and developing a schematic and logic diagrams from the images.

asdff 5y ago
So how come you can independently re implement an API but if you try and do that with a hard good and slap a ford mustang badge you reimplemented independently onto it you get sued? Further more this is software. Why can't the team looking at the source code just write up the new code rather than write up a spec? Seems like such a useless performance considering you could just run a diff or something to catch plaigerism.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Because if you basically just rename variables and some other lazy obfuscations, it's still a copyright violation. This isn't about efficiency. It's about using a process that's relatively resistant to legal challenge.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  > do that with a hard good and slap a ford mustang badge you reimplemented independently onto it you get sued? Ah, now we're getting into a completely different forms of IP protection. The Ford Mustang badge is a protected trademark, so you're not allowed to use it without their permission. The car itself might also contain patented technical or design elements that you may not be allowed to duplicate without a license. Broadly there's four classes of IP protection out there: copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. This discussion vis a vis reverse engineering is primarily centered around copyright protections. As for the rest of your comment, check out my other reply where I hopefully clarified things.

lostgame 5y ago

A great example of this would be called an emulator, and I'd argue that, yes - those are completely independent designs. So does the law. :)

pessimizer 5y ago

They don't pretend the design is independent, they explicitly have studied the design. The implementation is independent, because they have not studied the code. The code is what is protected by copyright. The design would be in the realm of patents.

BaseballPhysics 5y ago
On the last point, it's interesting to note that, at the time the IBM BIOS was being reverse engineered by various parties (around 1981/82), software patents were still not particularly well established. It wasn't until the Federal Circuit was established in '82 that there was a consistent treatment of software patent litigation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent#United_States One has to wonder if, today, the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS would be possible, given the likelihood that IBM would've patented their implementation.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Interesting point. We partially originally had software licensing in the IBM System/360 days because IBM was skeptical about how useful software patents were as a means of IP protection.