Date: Mon, 11 Dec 1995 12:42:29 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it (Luigi Rizzo) Cc: kallio@jyu.fi, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Connectix QuickCam Message-ID: <199512111942.MAA01652@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199512111106.MAA04229@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> from "Luigi Rizzo" at Dec 11, 95 12:06:58 pm
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> > BTW: Is it illegal to trace this kind of data and publish it as C-kode? > > I really don't know. Usually Terry has an answer for everything... Since you ask: In the US, it would be. They don't like reverse engineering and try to prosecute it under the Trade Secrets act. Something is a Trade Secret only until it is disclosed, after which it is no longer secret. Damages are limited to the original discloser. Actually, it turns out that there are no constitutional guarantees for Trade Secrets. This is because the US constitution attempts to promote progress in the arts and sciences through copyright and patent, which requires disclosure of the information. Trade Secret protection is generally not used unless the software company knows that what it has isn't patentable and isn't copyrightable, in which case they will use it as a last-ditch attempt as a legal anticompetitive practice. Many software companies have tried to extend trade secret protection after the first disclosure. Probably the most infamous (to this crowd anyway) was the USL/UCB law suit that cause us to abandon much of the pre 2.0 work as part of the agreement to avoid legal harrassment by USL. The UCB/USL consent decree diked out files from 6 major kernel subsystems, supposedly making it "impossible" to recreate a bootable kernel for several years. Obviously it wasn't, mostly because the "Trade Secrets" were a fiction and all it took was the time to rewrite the code. If you are in an EEC country, there is a clause which allows you to reverse engineer interfaces for the purposes of documenting them. That is, it is legal for someone to pull apart commercial code to see how it talks to hardware (or other commercial code) and document it so that other code can be written to perform the same function. Some US companies that are better at litigation than innovation call this the "Piracy Clause". As the US is a Berne signatory country, the US companies have no legal recourse to stop this sort of thing through legal intimidaton by Trade Secret (the process they use in the US). Since the original poster is in Finland, I actually don't know enough about the copyright law there to venture an opinion. But you could have a German friend (for instance) do it for you. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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