Patent Attorney's Counsel ... We Be FINE

[garfield at pilgrimhouse.com]

On Thu, 25 Jun 1998 19:10:36 -0400, Thomas Matthews
<Tmatthe1 at worldnet.att.net> wrote:

>This is really interesting, Gar, because as I read it guys like
>Steve Cole of TTS, and perhaps chip places like Hypertech, Faschip,
>ADS, etc... ARE breaking the law, while we on the list are free and
>clear in our disassembly activities... Is it OK to give away the
>info once we have it?
>Damn right I love the US of A too, we've got some problems, but we
>got it GOOD.(nothing against anyone who lives elsewhere in the world
>meant tho)
>Tom (CSH HQ worshipper)
>
>garfield at pilgrimhouse.com wrote:
>>
>> Dr. Pelican and company are doing in "reverse engineering" (heh, now I'm
>> gonna PARADE the term proudly) them GM ECMs and making any merry changes
>> and tweaks they want. Cuz they OWN one, so they can do any bloody thing
>> they want with them, including back out all the code, and do brain
>> surgery. You just can't SELL the information as if it belonged to you.

There very easily COULD be a problem, if a company is SELLING the code!
(I assume that's the case with these firms you mention above?) That's
just what I said in my post up there (last sentence). Each person
working along with BP also OWNS one of these ECMs to begin with, so
under the current (thank God) Fair Use doctrine of Copyright Law, anyone
is free to make copies of this code for their own use, alter it or
extend it to their heart's content. And THIS is international copyright
agreements, not just US.

This of course is a copyright issue, not a patent law issue. So again,
you get yourself into potential trouble from what you DO with the
information, NOT by obtaining it or even discussing or even exchanging
copies of it between people who OWN one of these ECMs to begin with.
Finally, strictly speaking, just like in excerpt copying from a book, if
you get to the point where you are COPYING the entire work, and in
essence making a substitute, and you don't OWN the work to begin with,
then you'd be infringing on the copyright. But in the case of divulging
the contents of proms inside an ECM for the PURPOSE of studying how they
work, you can copy and publish before the whole wide world, every line
of code in say the section that handles IGN timing, or the part that
does fuel delivery calcs, etc. etc. because THIS kind of excerpting for
"research, educational, or review" purposes is SPECIFICALLY ALLOWED
within the copyright laws, even if you don't own a copy!

The reason why I've taken the time on this last point, is because it
comes up all the time on our aviation group, since there are LOTS of old
books with sections in them pertinent to our sport. YES! you can copy
whole chapters outta a still-alive copyright'ed book, and post them to
the WORLD, as long as you're purpose is clearly to review the material,
the amount of material doesn't represent a substantial portion of the
work, etc. See, again, the law is not originally intended as a club the
rich & powerful can use against the pee wee, but rather a protection of
pee wee's rights AS WELL AS the ownership rights of the copyright
holder. As long as you don't do something with the work which damages
the sales of the work, like making a whole copy yourself or supplying
whole copies to the world, the copyright laws specifically allow for
this type of Fair Use. The doctrine of Fair Use doesn't just apply to
your fair use as an owner of the work, but also to it's "fair use" by
non-owners. And again, the purpose of these laws is to PROMOTE free
exchange of ideas published in any media, while also protecting the
commercial interests of the owner. These laws are there to PROTECT us
pee wees from being sued capriciously by some lout that says, "hey, you
just spoke a sentence outta my book; you gotta pay me the price of my
whole book to quote a sentence outta it!". No way Ray. Quote a whole
chapter or two, if you want. Just don't quote soooo much of it that any
judge settling your case would shake their head and say, "you just about
ate the WHOLE thing". Thas all.

So if you wanna discuss valve timing, for example, and you wanna quote
chapters (YES, Chapters!) on this subject from Ricardo's and Heywood's
books, you ARE free to do so. Just don't copy the whole bloomin thang to
the net, or enough than any sane judge would consider it "close enough
to the whole thang". This concept applies to "individual works", so you
can't extend this to say, "well, I only copied 5 pages from a magazine",
when those 5 pages contain an entire and complete article, cuz that
ARTICLE is a "WORK" in it's own right (with an author who holds
copyrights to it), again from which you can excerpt portions for
dicsussion, but NOT the whole thang. Get the picture?

Gar