Disclaimer: I am not a legal professional! The "reverse engineering" that is prohibited in most if not all EULAs has often NOT been upheld in court. There are circumstances where reverse engineering is considered to be an infringement and other circumstances where reverse engineering has been held to NOT be an infringement. With respect to the programs output, the matter is even less "cut and dried" since the essential content and even the manner of its expression is not automatically "owned" by the software maker.
Bill Leach RWMC Publications 526-4267 Pager 4165 -----Original Message----- From: Ayaz Hussain [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 12:11 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Is opening/saving closed-sourced file formats not license infringement? Hi, I was wondering about the nature of how some open sourced programs like OpenOffice are able to open and save to file formats used on other platforms such the Microsoft Word .doc file format. If reverse engineering is not allowed in the license agreement for Microsoft products and the only way to know how the .doc format works is through reverse engineering to enable programs like OpenOffice to be able to handle the files, then is it not license infringement? After all the product is closed-source for a reason...even if it is "clean reverse engineering", that becomes irrelevant, no? I don't ask this to speak ill of OpenOffice. I like it and use it, but I want to know that it is entirely legitimate so that I am not a party to any sort of copyright infringement practices. All I know is that the proprietary formats like .doc are not open to outsiders, and hence for programs like OpenOffice to be able to manipulate such files means that knowledge could only have been gained though reverse engineering, because surely Microsoft didn't willingly share it with us... Thanks. _________________________________________________________________ Connect to the next generation of MSN Messenger http://imagine-msn.com/messenger/launch80/default.aspx?locale=en-us&sour ce=wlmailtagline --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
