I read (well, skimmed) the full decision (240pp) and have some observations.
IANAL, of course, but these caught my eye:
- Secret names ("Rent Control", "Texas Wormhole") from the start seem a bit suss
- So does LzLabs buying Winsopia, which I still don't quite understand the
point of, since they were captive; this seems to have made things worse
- Winsopia did a lot of analysis, provided info to Lz, and was thus in breach
of the IBM license; since Lz owned Winsopia, that meant Lz was also in trouble
- They went to a lot of effort to avoid tainting the work (friend who worked
there had to get rid of all his IBM manuals)
- "Navitaire Inc v easyJet Airline Company & Another" [2004] weirdly said GUI
was copyrightable, commands were not
- "reverse engineering through the systematic use of traces, dumps, slip traps,
packet sniffing and other debugging tools/techniques" – heh, "slip traps"
(correctly capitalized later)
- "SLIP (Serviceability Level Indication Processing) is a diagnostic aid"--how
many here could tell you what SLIP stands for without looking it up? (I sure
couldn't!)
- A lot of the findings revolve around having "disassembled" various COBOL
functions; I can see the El Reg hed now: "COBOL sinks LzLabs"
- There was more than one such example cited, though the first one made me
laugh, as it was regarding 35 assembler instructions; even IBM agreed that this
wasn't enough to clone a subroutine
- You're allowed to disassemble to fix problems, just not to clone
- I don't understand this: "Firstly, Mr Anzani was employed by IBM Corp and has
never been an officer or employee of IBM" -- I guess this has to do with
multiple IBM entities but it sure reads weird
- The whole thing got kicked off, allegedly, by a guy named Soprano ("Sure is a
nice mainframe business ya got here...be a shame if sumpin' happened to it...")
who had worked there and went to IBM to say "Hey, these guys are stealin' yer
stuff"
It's not a full win for IBM:
"Conclusion: LzLabs, Winsopia and Mr Moores are liable for the tort of unlawful
means conspiracy."
But: "The unlawful means conspiracy claims against LzLabs UK, Mr Cresswell and
Mr Rockmann fail."
Dunno what this means in terms of penalties.
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