CompuServe Messages

John, OPINION! If a person reverse engineers data from a disk, writes a program that can understand the data, and distributes the program, what would the person be doing wrong? Surely not copyright violation, since the person never dissassembled the program the vendor selling the disk intended to be used with the data. If the person did it by dissassembling the program from the vendor, then there would be grounds for copyright violation. This would be similiar to the ibm BIOS clone roms – the actual roms were not dissassembled/copied, but the programmers had to write a new BIOS that dealt with the same data in the same manner. The difference with the CDROM case is we have to take the time to figure out the form the data is in, and we can make the program behave the way we want, not the same way the commercial program (on a pc) works. In my OPINION, there is only one way a person would be prevented from using data on a disk in a manner and on a different platform the vendor never intended, and that would be when the buyer of the disk had to sign a contract at the time of purchase or just prior to purchase that specifically stated how/on what the data could be used. One of these "tear the seal on the bag holding the disk means acceptance" contracts would not mean the same thing, since the contract implied in this case is not examinable/negotiable before purchase (you can't break the shrink wrap on the package). Someone would have to show me how we would be breaking some law or copyright violation before I would get worried! I doubt we would be seeing any comments from legal whiz's unless we waved green stamps under their noses – the only stuff they understnd! 73, Kelly