copyright infringement question

[Neal Campbell]

I completely agree with Ian but I am not so sure your first assumption
is as certain as you state. Many licenses state that you are not
allowed to "reverse engineer" their code. Its questionable what that
means (or if its enforcable) but I do know its part of quite a few
EULAs.

Neal

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 6:45 PM, Sadhunathan Nadesan
<sadhu at castandcrew.com> wrote:
> Greetings, venerable collegues,
>
>  Would you have a few minutes to give me your brief opinion on a
>  copyright/intellectual property infringement question?  There is a
>  difference of opinion at our company and I'm seeking some outside
>  perspective.
>
>  Or maybe, refer me to some URL?  Any help gratefully acknowledged
>  in advance.
>
>  The issue is, in developing a new software program to compete with other
>  companies that already offer such a program, what is acceptable with
>  respect to using the existing competitor's product?
>
>  It is clear that we can't legally steal their code, but can we
>  reverse engineer their product's basic features as long as those are
>  not proprietary features, and as long as we don't copy their look and
>  feel exactly?  For example, take IE and Firefox - both do many of the
>  same things, but in a slightly different way.  My understanding is,
>  you cannot copyright an idea - but you can copyright the expression of
>  an idea. This means it's ok to build a better browser as long as you
>  don't steal code or copy look at feel too closely.  Reverse engineering
>  is legal.  Agree?  I think in house we agree on that.
>
>  Next question is less clear.  Suppose our competitor has lots of
>  information about their product on their web site, including screen shots,
>  descriptions of features, and even downloadable demonstration versions.
>  What is acceptable when we are talking to potential software consultancy
>  firms that we might hire to build our own product.  Can we say, take a
>  look at the competitor's web site?  That gives an idea of what we want but
>  of course, ours will be different and better.  One opinion in house says,
>  no, we cannot do this, we could be sued for that.  The other opinion
>  says, there is nothing illegal about it, we are not stealing anything
>  it's a freely available download on the net, and it's the fastest way
>  to give an idea to vendors of what we want.  In fact, we need them to
>  see it to make sure ours is not too close a copy.
>
>  What do you think?
>
>  Next question is an extension of this:  suppose we make a video clip
>  of a certain behavior within the competitor's product - it's nothing
>  extraordinary, it's just difficult to explain in words and even in a
>  series of jpegs, but, an mpeg says 1000+ words in a few seconds of motion.
>  It's not patentable behavior, just hard to describe without seeing it,
>  and we want it to be the same way in our product.   We could build it
>  so as to show people (if we had someone available), whereas, we really
>  want our vendor to build it (or better yet, proclaim, "we have that
>  out of the box in our toolkit").  It could be the small thing that
>  really effects the project cost.  So again, one opinion in house says,
>  this is not right, we cannot do it, it's illegal to make that video
>  clip and share it, and another opinion says, it's perfectly legal to
>  make movies of anything in public, including demo software in action,
>  peope do it on their cell phones and post it to youtube by the millions.
>  We are just showing a concept, not stealing anything.
>
>  Your opinion?
>
>  And/or, is there any site you might refer me to which would have legal
>  opinions on these matters?
>
>  Thanks,
>  Sadhu
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-- 
Neal Campbell
Abroham Neal Software
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(540) 242 0911
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