[Visionaries] reengineering - a threat to copyleft? (was Re: SilverScheme...)

[Norbert Bollow]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Peter Minten <address@hidden> wrote:

> it produces statements
> that you can feed into a proof engine. You can use the proof engine
> to create new statements build upon the old statements. Even though
> the statements produced by the introspector are logically (dunno
> about legally) derivate works of the input the inferred statements
> don't need to be. In theory one could use this technique to rebuild
> a program from introspection data about it without using the actual
> introspection data in the rebuild program.

Consider an optimizing compiler.  When it generates native code from
a high-level language, and the input file was copyrighted and GPL'd,
the output will be subject to the same copyright and GPL license.

I don't see how the situation can possibly be any different for an
automated reengineering process like you describe.

> It's all just a matter of the fact that drawing conclusions based on
> information can't be considered copying that information (or
> otherwise we would have a massive copyright violation problem in
> schools :-).

Copyright does not protect information; it protects _creative_
expression.  

If a student learns something from a schoolbook and writes the
insights in their own words into their exercise book, that act
of writing down the insights is creative expression.  The result
a is copyrighted work, with the copyright owned by the student.

If a student takes an old book (where the copyright has expired)
and changes the text in some way which does not require any
creativity, the result will still be in the public domain.  For
example, suppose the student takes the text of B.T.Washington's
autobiography "Up from slavery", and reverses every word.  This
results in a text that starts with "I SAW norb a evals no a
noitatnalp in nilknarF ytnuoC, ainigriV. I ma ton etiuq erus fo
eht tcaxe ecalp..."  This laborious exercise will not change the
copyright status of the text precisely because there is no
creativity involved.  Doing the same with a more recent book 
(where the copyright hasn't expired yet) would be a copyright
violation, except if permission from the book's publisher is
obtained first, and the exercise would result in a derivative
work with the copyright owned by the book's publisher.

> > I don't think that anything is inevitable... but I think that new
> > technologies which increase flexibility should be endorsed by the
> > Free Software movement.  Even when it is the case that such
> > technologies weaken copyleft they also weaken the mechanisms that
> > proprietary software uses to lock users in.
> 
> There is a big difference between the proprietary industry and us,
> they can use EULA's preventing reverse engineering, we can't.

I'm not concerned about proprietary companies trying to use EULAs to
prevent reverse engineering.  There are enough countries where the law
allows reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability regardless
of what the EULA may say.  When the reverse engineering work has been
done in such a country where the anti-reverse-engineering EULA clauses
are legally null and void, the insights which have been obtained by
means of reverse engineering can be published and then they can be
used by anyone anywhere without being affected by that EULA.  (EULAs
are contracts and hence they don't affect you unless you agree to
them in some way.)

Hence, any advances in reverse engineering technology will make
"secret source" strategies of proprietary software companies less
effective.

The only danger for the Free Software movement from that which I can
see is this:  If making binary-only distributions becomes very
ineffecitve in withholding the basic freedoms from software users,
legislators in countries with big proprietary software companies might
become more inclined to pass laws against Free Software, and to put
pressure on countries which still have decent laws, trying to get bad
legal principles adopted worldwide.

I think that in the long run, proprietary software has little chance
to compete successfully against Free Software, provided that always
some countries remain where reverse engineering for purposes of
interoperability is always legal, and some countries remain where
software technologies are not patentable.  When a country screws
its legal system up too badly, that will mainly damage that country's
own economy.  (The US is currently moving pretty fast in this
direction, and the EU is in serious danger of following US leadership
in this area.  I'm also concerned because if the EU screws their laws
up, Switzerland will be in grave danger of following their example.)

Greetings, Norbert.

- -- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of http://gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59        Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://norbert.ch
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE/S2gvoYIVvXUl7DIRAkZcAJ48DPc8hqk9Yncmk+nJbZ2umCEo8QCaAi1y
bhPuM2c/VCX0GnXkW6R9gCk=
=knQC
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----