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> 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 wa
by 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 agoSo 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 agoBecause 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.