Full credit to MazeFrame for the original post. Just thought this deserved it’s own thread.
This has a very interesting implication. The way I see it, this not only reinforces, but entrenches, the transformative requirement for fair use. It strikes a massively critical blow to the current practice of the DMCA enforcement we see on websites. While I personally think that the DMCA is a load of crap, it does provide us a good middle ground.
I think this will provide a level of security through case precedent for Free Software projects that seek to reverse engineer proprietary firmware and provide an open source alternative.
So is this it, final-final-MainBranchCommit-100%Tested-RC1-RCFinal, no more re trying this, no more appeals, Actually A Real Judgement that sticks and has no higher or secret court or political brown envelopes passed, NOT A TEST, Cannot stress this enough, The Real McCoy?
From a “think about it”-standpoint, this is the only logical conclusion.
Because when you make a screw with a special head, what prevents anyone else from making a tool that fits that head?
I read an excerpt from the document linked in the tweet.
Apparently, the big ordeal was because Google kept the same name and class path of ~36 packages because if they changed this to something else too much shit would break. So while they kept the names the same they re-wrote all the business logic that performs the tasks. Oracle didn’t like that.
“Google reimplemented a user interface, taking only what was needed to allow users to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program,” Breyer wrote.
Seems fairly broad to me. IANAL but that seems to fit with clean-room reverse engineering of proprietary blobs.
Hmmm, not sure who Szpajda is (did they just do catbutt on a keyboard?) but it seems to me that more lawsuits of a similar nature will end the same way.
You can take anything to court. Doesn’t mean you’ll win.
This is excellent news for anyone involved with emulators and things like wine. But more on the “we can keep going as normal and not worry about getting sued for clean room reverse engineering” rather than like “this opens up new possibilities”.
I’m curious how emulators will fare in this, simply due to the fact that most of the time, people tend to be emulating games they didn’t rip themselves, and therefore, there’s… piracy concerns.
Though, deluge and transmission aren’t illegal just because they can be used to download movies.
From the emulators I am familiar with, the projects all make a large effort to separate the development of the emulator from the piracy aspect of emulation. This is for open source emulator projects where the developers are actually know what they are doing (Dolphin, RPCS3, PCSX2, etc), but not the sorts of products that repackage another emulator but slap a new GUI on top.
Also, they often have a section on how to rip your own games yourself (which may have DMCA 1201 problems, but that is a separate issue), and they specifically forbid discussion about piracy on their forums/mailing lists.
Basically as you said, x aren’t illegal just because they can be used to do y
Now, emulators can still run into legal issues if they include code from whatever they are emulating, or are built from copyrighted internal documents or whatever.
Well it looks like no, this will come up again with another set of people, the Google vs. Oracle part looks done but this got not where is any sort of scheme grand or otherwise.
Usual IANAL, layman qualifier.
This did nothing for the “copyright API” problem, as far as I can read Oracle won that and they can copyright an API. What Google won was fair use over a specific set of APIs and how they used them, not a general judgement that applies wide to everyone.
As stated above I’m not qualified, BUT, this ruling appears to me to have exactly nothing to do with any of that. Clean room reverse engineering is just as legally hazardous now as it ever was. Google did not reverse engineer as far as I know, they just exposed and implemented into their own code APIs as they were intended to used. And have only been branded a fair use clearing on that one use case, for the one company, in that one product.
