My guess at the origins of this project... Firm somewhere far away where Microsoft's lawyers cannot reach (China?) wanted Skype capability in their product and paid this smart Russian guy to reverse-engineer the Skype client. Smart guy gets permission to open source it and publishes it with commercial license option with hopes of finding more such clients. Personally I'd not touch this with a 3-meter bargepole, becau…
In Europe, reverse engineering a protocol + building a commercial product on it, is legal. You cannot copyright a protocol or an API, if you built something merely by studying how it works.
If this is newly written code not based on Skype code then there is clearly no copyright issue. Trademark is a potential problem but easily solved by removing the Skype name from the project.
Lawyers are paid to make cases. Here, it's quite simple. The author of this code saw the Skype code, indeed he admits it. Then he wrote new code. Same person. Your honor, it is unreasonable for him to claim that his new code was not heavily influenced by what he had seen. It is like me listening to a song and then writing a new one "heavily inspired by it", and then claiming I'm not committing copyright infringement.…
I have exploited several products that align closely with protocols and/or brand names used by large companies. For every single product, I have received a request to take down my product. And in every single case, after my (kickass, I must add) IP lawyer wrote them a reply, they went away.
> Personally I'd not touch this with a 3-meter bargepole, because I live in a country where people use copyright and trademark law to take people to court, yet it's an interesting project. You feel using it would open you up to a copyright claim?
If I used this in a commercial product, it would be trivial (absolutely trivial) for the owner of the original product to take me to court for illegal distribution of their copyrighted works, based on the argument that the code I was distributing (for profit!) was written by someone who (by own admission in public) had reverse-engineered the original product. IANAL but I'd be willing to bet money on this. The only qu…
As long as you didn't use any of the original Skype code, you have nothing to fear (if you're based in Europe)
My guess at the origins of this project... Firm somewhere far away where Microsoft's lawyers cannot reach (China?) wanted Skype capability in their product and paid this smart Russian guy to reverse-engineer the Skype client. Smart guy gets permission to open source it and publishes it with commercial license option with hopes of finding more such clients. Personally I'd not touch this with a 3-meter bargepole, becau…
In Europe, reverse engineering a protocol + building a commercial product on it, is legal. You cannot copyright a protocol or an API, if you built something merely by studying how it works.
The issue here is this appears likely to have been created by disassembly rather than pure study of behavior.
In Europe, reverse engineering a protocol + building a commercial product on it, is legal. You cannot copyright a protocol or an API, if you built something merely by studying how it works.
The issue here is this appears likely to have been created by disassembly rather than pure study of behavior. Is that legal in Europe?
In Europe, reverse engineering a protocol + building a commercial product on it, is legal. You cannot copyright a protocol or an API, if you built something merely by studying how it works.
The issue here is this appears likely to have been created by disassembly rather than pure study of behavior. Is that legal in Europe?
I'm not entirely sure of that. If you would have two teams though, it would. Team A creates a spec of the protocol, and Team B implements a connection lib based on the spec created by Team A.
Europe tends to be pretty good through, copyright wise.
One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. The advantage of this for open source is that when the protocol changes, it's relatively simple for that first team to update the spec, and safe for the second team to update their code. This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers.
> One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. How is the first team compensated? or am I missing something? >This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers. Very interesting. Does anyone have a link to a write up on this? or at least have a place to start looking for info on it?
Not a typical recommendation, but they actually created a not half-bad Television series out of the story. From everything I've read on the subject, the first season of the show actually does stay pretty close to how things actually went down (with some 'dramatic' elements slightly embellished since it is on TV after all). The story is worth reading about (sorry for no recommendations on this), and the show, at least the first season which concerns this issue in particular, is worth watching as well if the topic interests you. The show is called 'Halt and Catch Fire'
The issue here is this appears likely to have been created by disassembly rather than pure study of behavior. Is that legal in Europe?
I'm not entirely sure of that. If you would have two teams though, it would. Team A creates a spec of the protocol, and Team B implements a connection lib based on the spec created by Team A. Europe tends to be pretty good through, copyright wise.
Yes, clean-room reimplementations are legal everywhere. The problem with this code is it's not clean room. This leaves commercial users open to serious accusations of copyright infringement (as in, criminal prosecution.) See my comments in the thread. IANAL and my analysis is based on the README of the project.
One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. The advantage of this for open source is that when the protocol changes, it's relatively simple for that first team to update the spec, and safe for the second team to update their code. This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers.
> One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. How is the first team compensated? or am I missing something? >This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers. Very interesting. Does anyone have a link to a write up on this? or at least have a place to start looking for info on it?
I see absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to profit from this. You're not being forced to use a commercial license, and the LGPL is adequate for most open source use cases.
Reversing in the first place is almost certainly illegal if you were to check the Skype ToS. Making a profit off it is just asking for trouble. I could be wrong though.
Reversing are explicitly allowed in EU government as other based human laws.
I mean, EU have a much more great priority then Skype TOS.
If someone will add to Skype TOS "and please dont breath or dont go to toilets during use of our application". It will have zero effects in legal meaning. Because it break upfront law and United Nations based rights and etc.
tldr;
They just try to fear you with "dont do this" thing.