PROMs and Copyrights...

[Chris Conlon]

I'm not a lawyer either, but this is what I recall from my days as part
of a small software house.

At 02:05 PM 1/24/99 -0800, Orin Eman wrote:

>As far as copyright is concerned, my guess (IANAL etc.) is that
>it is technically illegal to sell a chip containing modified GM
>code - it would be a derivative work.  Just changing a few bytes
>or tables isn't sufficient...

Greg says 10% changed, the number I recall is 25%, but this had
been devised to cover books, movies, etc. I'm not sure how it tested
out in the courts for binary code, especially as opposed to source
code.

A lot of desktop software is "licensed" to you and part of the license
is an agreement that you won't reverse engineer it, etc. I'm not sure
how enforcable this is, but I am sure that Microsoft has more money
than you do (unless maybe Ross Perot is on this list, in which case
I apologize) and IMHO that's mostly all that matters - how much court
time can you afford?

>However, GM would be hard pressed to prove any actual damages.  After
>all, you need their hardware to run the code!

They don't have to prove any damages at all, IIRC. $25,000 per
instance of violation was the number I recall. Giving the software
away I think counts as selling it for $0, so you're still pinched.

OTOH with ECU PROMs, reverse engineering it should be ok unless it says
somewhere in the pile of papers you sign that it's not. (Which I doubt.)
Posting info you got from reverse engineering I *think* is ok, as
long as you're not posting big chunks of the original binary too.
Think of it as literary criticism, there's a de facto tradition of
"fair use" of small snippets of the original work. But info you got
from reverse engineering ("change $3acc from $00 to $ff to disable
blah blah blah") should be fine, as long as you aren't under a non-
disclosure agreement from GM or anything like that.

Anyway this is interesting enough for me to send to one of my lawyers
and seek a real answer.

   Chris C.