🚀 go-pugleaf

I just ran across an interesting article in Business Week (May 7,
1990, p.138 "Defense Against Pirates or Death to the Clones?").

It seems that the European Commission is considering a set of laws
that would substantially extend copyright protection in the EC.
The proposal would apparently prohibit disassembling code in order
to learn the operational details of proprietary protocols.  

In the U.S. (and most other countries, I believe), if two devices
communicate using a protocol which the manufacture refuses to publish,
one can reverse engineer it (assuming no patents), both by looking at
communication in action and by disassembling the code which drives it.
Copyright protects the code only from being copied, not against having
its functionality determined.  The proposed law would prohibit this
type of analysis.

DEC, IBM and Apple are lobbying for it.  Amdahl, Fujitsu, NCR, Unisys
and a host of others are lobbying to exclude software interfaces from
the new EC directive and "explicitly permit analysis of software
products to extract interface information."

Sounds like a serious battle.  I was somewhat surprised to see DEC's
name next to IBM's and Apple's.  Does anyone know any details?

Jim Helman
Department of Applied Physics			6 Trillium Lane
Stanford University				San Carlos, CA 94070
(jim@thrush.stanford.edu) 			(415) 723-9127