Re-using the reverse engineered code is the problem, he should have simply used it to spec out the protocol and then use that spec to re-implement it.
This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Basically, you need to find developers with no experience at all with the technology (e.g. never used Skype before), and then get another set of developers to reverse engineer the product, and send the spec to the "naive" developers, for lack of a better term.
This approach to cloning was established long ago (1960's) by IBM's competitors and has always been legal.
You can just google "clean room design", Wikipedia is quite informative on it.
BTW a few early PC firms did try to cut corners and clone the PC BIOS without the chinese wall; they were sued and died. This isn't theory; it's been practice for decades.
Here was a little insight:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/06/03/skype-protocol-c...
I live in a EU country where interoperability is a law yet is almost never respected, so I say, fuck copyright in that case.
However, this is not the first successful reverse engineering of skype. Each time they broke compatibility with their next version.
The reason why people want to see a clean room implementation is because they are afraid of patent and anticipate US-like silliness like Oracle claiming copyright on an API. Now that this is a very US-specific issue. If you don't plan to market to US, you can just ignore the issue.
I used to work for a French AR company. We were successful and at one point we planned to open offices in the US, but even without having done that, we already had received two frivolous claims by people based in the US (one who claimed he patented the idea of replaying the video at a varying speed). This delayed a bit our opening to the US and the first US employee was... a lawyer.
Do you realize that patents and copyright hell is the reason why, for more than a decade, VLC, a project made by French students, was better at playing videos than Microsoft's player, even when this was seen as crucial? Because France did not have to care for patent litigation.
And clean-room implementations have no effect on patent violations or claims. None at all. It is entirely a copyright issue. And the issue here is that the same person who disassembled one codebase then wrote a new, equivalent codebase. Thus the new work is a derived work, or at least a lawyer can argue that easily, and thus distributing it for profit is a serious crime. Not even a civil offense, in any EU country. Criminal.
And this is totally stupid. This amounts to claiming that musicians derive their work from others. Of course they do.
Lawyers make such arguments all the time and it comes down to who has the time & money to take them to court, and defend against them, and then the judge is a human who decides, and is heavily influenceable.
Only the first one makes sense, and it has no relevance to the project we're discussing, so it's unclear why you say it.
No disrespect, just trying to understand your point here.
To me the point is pretty clear: Copyright law is also used for chilling effects on recalcitrant projects.
Is that legal in Europe?
Europe tends to be pretty good through, copyright wise.
In fact I'd be surprised if this code isn't taken off GitHub by a DCMA from Microsoft, as soon as it hits their lawyers' radars.
It's not illegal in itself. But you are easily opening yourself up to claims that the code you have written has been "tainted" by the disassembled code you have read and has therefore become a derivative work, which is going to be very to defend hard against.
Also note that even if it is decided that you have made a derivative work you might still successfully launch a fair use defense on the grounds on interoperability, see e.g. Sega v. Accolade[1].
That said, doing a proper clean-room reverse engineering with two teams kept separate is a much safer approach.
You feel using it would open you up to a copyright claim?
IANAL but I'd be willing to bet money on this.
The only questions would be (a) is the original product one that matters enough to protect in such a way and (b) does the owner of that original product have the money and lawyers to start such legal actions.
This isn't some random app. This is one of Microsoft's crown jewels we're talking about.
The original Skype code is clearly not available to anyone outside the original Skype team or some team inside Microsoft. What is publicly available is a binary that is produced from this code.
The elements of the software doing novel technical stuff might be patented, but copying the technical working is allowed. Copyright doesn't protect technical aspects.
If the project copies the UK of Skype, then that's a tort. If it copies the written code or uses the human reading of that code to derive a new codebase, then that's a tort. If it copies the technical implementation, how memory is accessed, what codecs are used, what packets are sent and when ... that's not copyright infringement.
Looks useful for command and control type applications though.
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, because I live in a country where people use copyright and trademark law to take people to court, yet it's an interesting project.