On 18 July 2010 21:56, Roderick Colenbrander <[email protected]> wrote:
> Others have mentioned before that the only 'reverse' engineering > method we allow is black box reverse engineering. Technically this is > black box, but I would say that you can't use the output because of > copyright reasons. In the US, a public domain dataset cannot be made copyright by a machine transformation, per Bridgeman v. Corel. Wikimedia has dealt with this one extensively - running the data through a Microsoft machine transformation absolutely does not establish a new copyright. This is established law. In other countries, it is less certain. However, approximately no-one is willing to risk their asserted copyrights trying it out. The last one Wikimedia had was the National Portrait Gallery making legal threats, and merely making the threat got them pretty much ostracised by the museum and academic community and Wikimedia are about the only people still on speaking terms with them, 'cos we love everybody and approached their foolish legal aggression as an error ;-) - d.
