On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 11:04:33AM +0100, Rob Taylor wrote: > On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 11:52 +0200, David Weinehall wrote: > > On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 10:37:17AM +0100, Rob Taylor wrote: > > > On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 23:07 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > > > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > > > Hash: SHA1 > > > > > > > > On 05-07-2005 19:42, Rob Taylor wrote: > > > > > On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 19:17 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > > > > > > > > >>On 05-07-2005 18:40, Rob Taylor wrote: > > > > > cool, that'll be very useful. out of interest, whats controversial? > > > > > > > A good short intro is here: http://lwn.net/Articles/137824/ > > > > > > ah, yes, judging from the patch, the author who reverse engineered this > > > in the 1st plasce obviously just copied some tables directly out of the > > > rom and didn't understand what they were. Thats certainly an issue. > > > Howver the standard issue of copyright not pertaining well to the > > > digital domain comes in here. what happens then if *i* then read the > > > code, that table, derive their meaning, and recode them in a meaningful > > > form? ;) > > > > That's generally also frowned upon. However, if you read that table, > > derive its meaning, write an explanation about it, and someone else > > writes the code, *only* using your explanation, you're usually on > > safe ground, as long as you don't violate and patents =/ > > > > But IANAL, and all that... > > well, lets take for example a set of parameters for a DCT, or worse, a > symbol table from a RLE/VLE. How could i explain what those parameters > are to someone else, without using those values themselves or some > derivative thereof? AFAICT, the answer is, you cant. does that mean > reverse engineering all lossy compression for protocol compatibility is > impossible? I don't think its a clear cut question ;) Information that can have no other possible value for the software to work correctly is functional in nature and therefore by definition cannot be covered by copyright. It can be patented in the US and other extreme-right-wing nations. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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