from Hacker News

Rivals can create copycat software through testing and user manuals: UK court

by epo on 11/29/13, 10:39 AM with 30 comments

  • by antimagic on 11/29/13, 11:49 AM

    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...

  • by CalRobert on 11/29/13, 11:49 AM

    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...

  • by ZoFreX on 11/29/13, 12:00 PM

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

  • by jsmeaton on 11/29/13, 11:52 AM

    > "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.

  • by kunai on 11/29/13, 5:57 PM

    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.

  • by fnordfnordfnord on 11/29/13, 6:23 PM

    Rivals may create copycat software through testing and user manuals?

  • by ronaldx on 11/29/13, 1:10 PM

    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

  • by loceng on 11/29/13, 6:41 PM

    What about for the visual aspects of software?