Joe Moore wrote: > Michael Poole wrote: >>See also http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.html, which remarks both >>that the whole of the derivative work must represent an original work >>of authorship, rather than an arrangement of distinct works, and that >>mechanical (non-creative, ergo non-copyrightable) transformation of the >>original does not make a derivative. > > Doesn't this mean that the compiled (in the computer sense) binary is not a > derivative work of the source? (mechanical transformation from C code to > ELF executable does not make a derivative?) > > That's an interpretation of law that seems a bit too extreme to be > reasonable. > It would (if correct) make a lot of current copyright infringement (or as it > is sometimes called "software piracy") legitimate. Since I'm not > distributing the source code (which is the original work of authorship), > just a mechanical transformation of it (ergo non-copyrightable), giving > MSOffice.exe to all my friends is not a copyright violation?????
Indeed. For that matter, disassemblers perform mechanical translations, so if the disassembled code were not a derived work of the executable, that would greatly aid most reverse-engineering efforts. - Josh Triplett
