
Rivals can create copycat software through testing and user manuals: UK court - epo
http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2013/november/rivals-can-create-copycat-software-through-testing-developers-software-and-interpreting-their-user-manuals-rules-uk-court/
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antimagic
Heh. Funny story - I was once asked to clone the Foxtel STB in Australia for a
competitor - they wanted to be able to take the box along to a demo at Foxtel,
plug it in, and show the same interface as the real Foxtel STB, but better.
So, taking the company's in-house middleware, and a UI framework that I had
recently written, I went about cloning the Foxtel box, screen by screen,
keypress by keypress.

This was in the 90s, and STB interfaces were in their infancy - there were no
animations, or alpha blending, or huge databases of films, including images of
jackets etc - it was mostly just text and some simple vector graphics. All of
which made my life as a programmer much easier, thankfully, because I only had
about a week to get the thing done.

The funny part of the story comes in when I discovered that the software was
just full of bugs. I would press a button on the remote control on a certain
screen and the STB would reboot. This proved to be a bit of a problem for me,
because I had to try and figure out what we were actually supposed to do, but
as I wasn't allowed to disassemble the actual Foxtel code and see what it was
trying to do, I was quite perplexed.

3 days into the week my boss was starting to get edgy - I had all of the most
common screens up and running, but he could see that I had logged a whole
bunch of bugs into the bug tracker, and I apparently wasn't making much
progress in getting them fixed. So he came by my desk to see what was going
on. I explained to him that the bugs existed in the original STB that I was
copying, and the best replacement functionalities that I could come up with
led to quite a bit of complexity in the code base. My boss looked at me
quizzically, and then just shrugged his shoulders "Just dereference a NULL-
pointer!".

Oh. Right. We never did get a contract from Foxtel, but I gave one of the
cloned STBs to a neighbour to test in real-life conditions. I couldn't pry it
out of his hands afterwards though - he thought it was so much better than the
original product, dereference NULL pointers and all...

~~~
lelandbatey
For those like me who didn't quite understand, STB stands for _set - top box_.

Also, that's a pretty cool story actually!

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CalRobert
So if you make something that so much as uses a shopping cart you violate 394
patents, but if you grab the manual and make something virtually identical
you're in violation of no copyright?

I get that patents != copyright, but we're still entering a rather strange
state of affairs...

~~~
shawabawa3
This is in the UK, not Texas.

AFAIK, software patent trolling isn't very bad in the UK

~~~
Already__Taken
Very bad? I thought we didn't recognise software patents how could it even be
possible? US Import law maybe?

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ZoFreX
It's not new that black box reverse engineering is allowed, I was taught this
in my IT classes (I'm in the UK).

~~~
noir_lord
Indeed however in the UK we operate a common law legal system which means that
precedent and case law account for much of our legal system (in effect the law
says X is legal but then the case law defines exactly when and when X is
legal).

A case like this is highly useful at staving off spurious law suits and
spoiling tactics (particularly from bigger players against smaller players).

I think it's a _good_ decision.

~~~
gsnedders
Note that this only sets precedent for cases under English law (and not Scots
or Northern Irish law).

~~~
SEMW
True, but it's worth remembering that the EWCA appeal was at least partly
applying a ruling by the CJEU about the same dispute (C-406/10 SAS v WPL),
which applies EU-wide.

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jsmeaton
> "In order to try to limit who can access learning or development editions of
> software products, companies may want to think about restricting who is the
> 'lawful user' of their software,"

And that's why we have 416 page EULAs.

~~~
Silhouette
The idea described in that part of the article, that software vendors selling
their software to an organisation should try to licence to an individual from
that organisation personally, also seems like an unhealthy principle to me.

If I'm an employee, I don't want to be tied down to some third party's
arbitrary commercial licensing terms just to do my job for the employer who is
paying for that software so I can. Software vendors put some crazy things in
EULAs, and there's no way I want to be the guy going to court to find out
whether any of them stands up when tested.

As an employer, it's an even more blatant cash grab than moving one-time
purchases to subscription arrangements without any useful improvement in other
areas to justify it. It creates a fixed cost that walks out the door with the
same notice that the employee in question gives to leave their employment. And
depending on the software vendor's policies, it may be an irreplaceable asset,
if for example they force you to upgrade to the latest version when buying a
replacement, which in turn creates built-in obsolescence.

I'm pretty sure I'd refuse to accept the terms of such a licence agreement in
either role. There is absolutely nothing in it for the licensor, as far as I
can see. It seems like it's just warping the concept of copyright another step
in favour of the copyright holder, which the very idea of licence agreements
already does to a dubious extent anyway.

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kunai
I'm quite certain that most jurisdictions in the United States have some sort
of laws to prevent the restriction of "clean-room" reverse-engineering...
which is why projects like GNU and BSD were even possible to begin with. In
any case, this is a huge blow for the big companies and a huge win for the
smaller ones.

~~~
LukeShu
BSD was not "clean-room", and AT&T sued when it was freely distributed,
because they didn't believe that all AT&T code had been removed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi)

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fnordfnordfnord
Rivals _may_ create copycat software through testing and user manuals?

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ronaldx
I'm slightly surprised to see the statement:

"...non coding structural elements of software are not protected by copyright"

as I had understood that there is database copyright. Reference on the same
site: [http://www.out-law.com/page-5698](http://www.out-law.com/page-5698)

~~~
SEMW
This decision was interpreting the Software Directive and the Information
Society Directive. Databases are protected under their own directive
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive)).

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loceng
What about for the visual aspects of software?

~~~
teachingaway
In the U.S., visual aspects of software are generally copyrightable. Check out
the Pac-Man v. KC Munkin case from 1982. There are several others.
www.copyrightcodex.com/infringement/16-infringement-substantial-
similarity/software-copyright-infringement#Pac-Man_v_KC_Munchkin

But when "visual" includes GUI, there's less copyright protection (because
user interface elements are functional). Check out the Apple v. Microsoft case
from 1994 as an example.

I'm not sure what the equivalent UK law would be.

~~~
lambada
Those cases are US cases. Given this thread concerns UK law, it might be
better to find equivalent UK cases that establish this. (Indeed, the lack of
previous UK cases is why the threads link is so notable)

~~~
teachingaway
You're totally right (I edited original comment to reflect that those are US
cases). I'm not sure what the equivalent UK law would be.

