Re: European Directive on Copyright Law (91/EC/250) wrt open source

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>]

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

>  i notice in particular that 50B says you may not disclose
>  what you decompile [to a higher level language] to any party except
>  those involved in the decompilation process.
> 
>  that is 1) _not_ in the 91/EC/250 directive that i saw three years
>  ago 2) _not_ in the 91/EC/250 directive that i see now.
> 
>  that stops - dead - any benefit by the open source community to
>  perform reverse engineering, because it explicitly says that you
>  may not release the source code.
Common confusion.  That sort of decompilation is *not* the only sort of
reverse engineering.

Proper "clean room" or "Chinese Wall" reverse engineering involves two
groups -- one does the decompilation and testing and generates very careful
specs from it.  The other group attempts to make an implementation which
fulfil the specs.  There is never direct transfer of copyrighted material
to the group doing the new implementation: the specs should not contain any
copyrighted material from the original implementation, and the new
implementation should not contain any copyrighted material from the specs.

-- 
There are none so blind as those who will not see.