[ros-kernel] FAQ: Clean Room reverse engineering vs Disassmbly

[Steven Edwards]

--- Casper Hornstrup <chorns at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> The US 9th circuit court does not agree with that statement.

The 9th Circuit court is called the 9th Circus in the US because It is
the most overturned court in the world. Just because they hand down a
judgement does not make it the law of the land in the US. Only in those
states that are under the jurisiticion of the 9th Circus. The rest of
the county is still free to inforce the law as they see it until the
Supreme Court steps in and overturns or agrees with one of the lower
courts. 

The using MS documentation to develop interfaces is fair use provided
you dont directly copy the information. Ripping apart of objects would
not meet this standard except to a wack job court like the 9th
Circus.....

See:

TITLE 17 - CHAPTER 1
Sec. 107. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use 

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html 

Subsection (1)
"the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of
a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes..."

Well ReactOS is both so the case could be made that we violate this
here unless we amend the GPL to not allow you to sell some of the
software. I dont agree with that but it is possible.

Subsection (3)
"the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole..."

The wording of "the amount and substantiality" is vauge at best. Are we
talking quantity of Copyrighted work as a whole or amount from each
source file? What is 90% of ntoskrnl took microsft a week to write and
the rest took them 1 year and then we hack in to the remaning 10% to
speed along our development? This is where we have to be careful about
how we obtain information.

Thanks
Steven




	
		
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