Re: [dvd-discuss] Court Sides With Geac in Mainframe Software Case

["Roy Murphy" <murphy(at)panix.com>]

'Twas brillig when Dean Sanchez scrobe:
>Did anyone notice the outcome of this case?  The Appeals court is 
>basically stating that modifying code for interoperability is >copyright infringement.
 We don't want to have any of the "promoting >progress" nonsense getting in
the way of corporate profits, do we?  >Everyone should know by now that reverse
engineering is bad, bad, bad!

I think that the case has been somewhat misrepresented. The license for the
software required that any third-party maintainers sign a non-disclosure agreement
with GEAC before being allowed to view the code. The consultants in question
were former employees of GEAC and they, arguably, used trade secrets that they
learned while working for GEAC in order to accomplish the modifications that
were requested. They did not sign non-disclosure agreements as required by the
license.

The problem was not making modifications to a source code supplied software
package, the problem was doing so without getting the required non-disclosure
agreements.

When a software provider makes source code available for modifications and the
sorce code contains trade secrets, I think it's quite reasonable for them to
require non-disclosure agreements from third-party consultants.
 
-- 
Roy Murphy      \ CSpice -- A mailing list for Clergy Spouses
murphy@panix.com \  http://www.panix.com/~murphy/CSpice.html