[ale] [WAY OT]Reverse Engineering MS Visual Basic Applications

[Irv]

On Wednesday 01 October 2003 11:36 pm, Jason Day wrote:
>
> I'm not sure what questions I left unanswered.  I left the carpenter
> analogy alone because, frankly, it doesn't really apply.  What is the
> source code in the carpenter analogy?  I never mentioned any royalties
> or who gets a cut of what, I just pointed out what is really common
> knowledge in copyright law: if you write something, you own the
> copyright on it (unless you wrote it as a work for hire, or you signed a
> contract beforehand stating otherwise).

A programmer's product is the program.
The carpenter's is the house.
Either way, the purchaser owns it.

To get back to the original question: 
Unless the purchaser signed an agreement stating otherwise, the 
software just like a book; the author owns the copyright.

The purchaser owns a copy, along with the right to do almost anything 
he wants to do with that copy. Sell it, loan it to a friend, burn it, cut out 
pages and rearrange them. Use whiteout to change each instance of "Harry 
Potter" to read "Jason Day". 

Even (horrors!) to be inspired to write a story about a boy 
hero who fights evil and gets the girl. Thank goodness for copyrights, 
otherwise something like that might have already happened!

The owner of the book just can't claim it as his own work, and can't make 
copies to sell or give away (taking profits from the author). 

If (as was stated) there is no access to the source code, then obviously 
any software written which happens to "work like" the original software 
cannot possibly contain any copied code. 

So unless the programmer has some kind of patent on a process
(in which case  the software would have the required notice to that effect) 
I can see nothing to stop you from writing your own software which does the 
same job. 

IANAL (said with significant pride and satisfaction) but remember, 
people get sued for doing perfectly legal things, because win or lose, 
there's always profit for the lawyers.

Irv