Re: Debian Gamers/Developers

[Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 11:55:52PM +0200, Nicos Gollan wrote:
> On Monday 21 October 2002 23:25, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> > That is correct, just so long as you don't use any of the original
> > author/publisher's code, artwork, etc.  If you create everything from
> > scratch, you're completely clear on copyright (unless their lawyers
> > can convince the judge that you did use their code, artwork,
> > whatever).
> 
> And now for some nice stuff that I once heard in a lecture. The prof. 
> said - and we asked rather specificaly - that you could even take 
> proprietary software like Windows, strip it of all "artistic" content 
> like image, text and sound resources, replace those resources by 
> selfmade ones and sell the resulting thing under another name. At least 
> in Germany. You cannot copyright algorithms, mathematical procedures 
> and so on, and any software that is stripped of any "artistic" content 
> is just a collection of well-known algorithms.

That wouldn't fly in the U.S., since you can copyright code here.
You could do a clean-room reverse-engineering job on Windows and sell
something else that does the exact same thing, but if you use
Microsoft binaries, you'll be in very deep, very smelly excement.
(And I'm not talking about the binaries.)

-- 
When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists
have already won. - reverius

Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss