Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
That is upsetting.
But still my question remains, If I have one screen open showing the source of a piece of software while I attempt to reword the code into another piece of software on another screen, how much of the original code needs to be reworded so that my code can be considered non-infringing? Apply this to every creative endeavor.
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There's a few tricky issues if the coders had access to the original source code as part of their employment. So I'll skip that as I don't know enough about it.
Reverse engineering of software and then re-implementing it is perfectly legal in many parts of the world. However, in order to have a strong defence that you didn't copy code it's more common to do a clean room implementation, often where one group disassembles the software to find out how it works and what it does, they can then document the way the software should work but not how it actually does work.
Another group can then re-implement the software based on that documentation. That way should any code end up working the same which would potentially have led to claims of copyright infringement, there's evidence to show no copying has taken place.
There isn't always a split between those who reverse and those who code though, see for example Richard Stallman's account of his time at MIT. The book is freely available online and an interesting read whether you agree with him or not imo.
Cloning and what is/is not legal is still a pretty open topic. There's been some high profile cases of small companies having their games cloned by large companies see
Tiny Tower. However in this case, the code may be totally different whilst the art/theme is very similar/cloned but not actually copied. The UI layout it can probably be argued has been copied, but then is layout copyrightable/protectable by any laws, I'm not sure.