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This case is ABOUT the legality white room reverse engineering | 249 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
And wildly innacurate....
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 05:18 AM EDT
But if the API was copyright, Compaq have committed copyright infringement by
implementing it (as have many others by distributing said BIOS machines); as, I
suspect, have Oracle regarding the APIs of Java - if ANY are the same as C++ or
C or BCPL or B or BASIC or any other pre-existing computer language they will be
breach of API copyright if APIs are copyrightable (as they claim).

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

More IBM's issue.
Authored by: Jaywalk on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 09:34 AM EDT
Actually, it's mostly because IBM didn't take the PC seriously. They did not
enforce the patents they had on the PC because they wanted to build the PC
market and they let the little software firm that supplied (note I did not say
"wrote") the operating system to license it off to other companies.
By the time they realized the size of the beast they had created, it was too
late to reign it back into the fold.

Of course, if they had maintained control, there might not be a PC market based
on their design in any case. CP/M anyone?

---
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

This case is ABOUT the legality white room reverse engineering
Authored by: jbb on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 02:20 PM EDT
The wide spread availability of cheap and customizable PCS (which is rapidly diminishing) is totally down to Compaq being able to white room reverse engineer the IBM PC,. including the BIOS and it's API..
Google's original argument was that since they had white room reverse engineered (WRRE) their implementation of Java there was no copyright violation. WRRE had been such common practice in the computer industry that most people here at Groklaw thought this part of the case would be a slam-dunk for Google and never make it to trial. Oracle countered by saying that since APIs are now copyrightable, WRRE is no long sufficient to bypass copyright violations. The whole point of WRRE is to re-implement an API without violating the copyright of the source code that was used for the initial implementation.

The current court battle is precisely over the issue of whether WRRE will still allow you to re-implement an API without violating copyright. If Oracle wins then there will be no more WRRE because any re-implementation of an API will be a copyright violation even if you have never seen the source code of the original implementation. Again, WRRE is premised on the idea that APIs are not copyrightable. If you are allowed to copyright APIs then WRRE becomes totally pointless.

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

And wildly innacurate....
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 02:55 PM EDT
True or false:

IBM had a copyright on the BIOS.

Answer: false.

Statement you quote: true.

Compaq's reverse engineering of the BIOS has nothing to do with whether it was
copyrighted or not.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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