News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Tool to convert copyrighted music into fair use by cortesoft on Sunday July 11, 2021 @03:14PM (#27803795)
If no code was copyrightable nor licensable, people could reverse engineer any code they get access to. It would be hard to keep code completely proprietary. You would not be able to distribute your code at all.

I am not saying this is the way we want to go, I am just curious about the thought experiment.

Re:Tool to convert copyrighted music into fair use by okamiueru on Sunday July 11, 2021 @07:58PM (#27805542)
Ok, if it's for a thought experiment then I'll play along. Reverse engineering source code is not as easy as you make it out to be. Not only that, but reverse engineering in the sense of black box is not a violation of most existing licenses. And, if we're talking about decompiling code into something useful, that too is a tall order.