[CREATE] on reverse engineering, patents and stuff

[Dave Crossland]

On 22/05/07, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> giving proprietary guys even a tiny chance to sue one of our
> developers should never occur.

All developers in the USA are under constant threat of patent
violation suits for all code they write. Developing free code to
read/write proprietary file formats has an additional risk of breaking
the 'technical protection measures' part of the DMCA.

I'm not aware of any "lock" features in INDD or CDR. Font formats have
locks, and FontForge breaks one kind [1] and hasn't had any problems,
while another kind had a tool that did face DMCA problems [2]. PDF has
locks, and I'm sure we're all familiar with the sklyarov debacle. [3]
And I'm sure that if there were any such legal problems, the EFF and
such would be more than helpful. (more abou this below)

[1] http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/fontutils.html
[2] http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/twm/embed/dmca.html
[3] http://www.freesklyarov.org/

> Thus two questions.
>
> 1. Did you ever discuss such legal issues with regards to Scribus,
> Inkscape and GIMP projects with lawyers? I know that Open Font Library
> has some contacts in this area since recently (Jon, please prove me
> wrong if I am :)) and that Creative Commons has lawyers. Could we
> possibly organize a good talk on this?

The week before the LGM I visited the Software Freedom Law Center in
New York City and met with Bradley Kuhn among others, and was very
impressed with whats going on there. I suggested to the Open Font
Library team that the project consider joining the SFLC's
"Conservancy" scheme. (The Inkscape project has already done so.)
AIUI, one of the benefits of joining is that projects get some access
to the SFLC staff lawyers in the case of legal threats.

http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org

> 2. If we know for sure that there will be problems, what do you think
> about at least hosting problematic code (CDR, INDD etc. importers) on
> a server located in Russia or some other country free of the scary
> patents/IP stuff?

Personally I think this is a great idea :-) However, anything that
actively promotes ILLEGAL MATHEMATICS, even HTML links. is also banned
in the USA, as its "trafficking" it. You can write text about where to
get it, such as a URL, but Americans may not write that URL as an
active, clickable link...

"The owners of the 2600 web site replaced their links with text URLs,
and so far are unpersecuted."
- http://www.templetons.com/brad/linkright.html

> One of the reasons I'm starting this discussion is that Igor and
> Valentin are up to reverse engineering more file formats after they
> are done with CDR

Amazing! I do hope they keep up their excellent work in this area, I
think its very neccessary and important work! :-)

-- 
Regards,
Dave