On Wednesday 12 December 2001 1:27 pm, Grainge, Derek wrote: [snip]
As far as I can see, someone can reverse engineer a product and develop something fairly similar. So longs none of the original code is used, the product can have a similar look and feel.
If you look (not very) carefully at the SSSCA and it's clones they *are* talking about making reverse-engineering illegal. This means that, for example, if the law gets passed and MS release MS OFFICE XP2 with a slightly different format for Words Docs, like adding the work 'Microsoft' at byte 3 onwards, and offsetting the rest of the contents nobody else will legally be able to update their software to read XP2 Word docs as that would be classed as reverse-engineering. Not being able to read/write Word docs wouls seriously affect StarOffice, KOffice etc.
Some software developers try to use the patent law to protect ideas. The law is not good at protecting them.
As A software developer I would be very pissed off if someone else used my ideas to produce a new program , and then takes my market away from me. Fair enough: that's what the law's for. Except it doesn't work properly :-)
I agree with you here about copyright and intelectual ownership. If consumers like your product enough to lay out capita of any form then you have a rights to greatfully accept it. This still holds true for OS software where the remunerations may or may not be tangiable. Copyright theft is theft!
Microsoft see a once only opportunity to deal with a competitor before he gets too big. I think much of that's going on in the States is smoke and mirrors, but it would cost the open source community serious money to fight it. That's the thing to worry about.
What Microsoft is doing is following their own normal business practices. If you cannot beat the oposition on a technical/quality basis, then beat them any way you can. Unfortunately, this time, MS have allies, in the music business for instance, who are making this fight look rightious.
Can someone point me at online references to the situation in the States? I'm out of date on developments.
http://www.parrhesia.com/sssca-draft.pdf http://www.petitiononline.com/SSSCA/petition.html I don't have any URL's for the DMCA but a good google search should give you a hand-full. -- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000