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Copyright, specifically code will only let you protect the IMPLEMENTATION, the code the copyright owner specifically made, not the IDEA of the code. > Good luc
by m-p-3 4y ago
Copyright, specifically code will only let you protect the IMPLEMENTATION, the code the copyright owner specifically made, not the IDEA of the code.
> Good luck trying to prove to any judge in the world that you came up with an implementation that happens to be exactly the same as the original game code, down to the same checksum, by pure chance.
Not impossible if you reverse engineer the software and look how the binary code is behaving, emulators does this all the time.
A reimplementation of code that leads to the same binary output isn't covered by the copyright, as long as you don't share copyrighted assets or the actual binaries. What people do with the alternative source code is their business, you can't hold responsible that person for others' action.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago> Not impossible if you reverse engineer the software and look how the binary code is behaving, emulators does this all the time. We are not talking about a program that "produces the same binary output" when executed. We are talking about a program that _is exactly the same_ as the original one, bit-by-bit. It is ridiculously impossible to "independently" discover a program that is _exactly the same machine code_ as the original program by just looking at the inputs and outputs of the original program. (Barring trivial programs, of course.) This is not reverse engineering. This is just dissasembling and decompiling.
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- m-p-3 4y agoBut they're not distributing the compiled output, only their own implementation of the source code which leads to that. If they happen to make their own source code which leads to the same assembly opcodes in the compiler, is that really copyright infringement?
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago"But Your Honor, I'm not distributing copies of the copyrighted program, just another program which happens to generate the copyrighted program bit-by-bit! All my original creation, even though I was literally looking at the copyrighted program while developing it..." Do you think that I can just gzip gplprogram.c and then redistribute gplprogram.c.gz under the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"?
- m-p-3 4y agoTechnically you would be distributing your own implementation, not the original source code. Copyright does allow you to do that. They just applied the concept of reproducible build on top.
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