Comment on Mario Kart 64 got finally decompiled!
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 month agoYeah, that’s why all the IBM clones had to write their BIOS firmware in clean room implementations of new software that implemented the same functionality as IBM’s own documentation described.
Functionality can’t be copyrighted, but code can be. So the easiest way to prove that you made something without the copyrighted code is to mimic the functionality through your own implementation, not by transforming the existing copyrighted code, through decompilation or anything like that.
Matriks404@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Exactly. But somehow I got downvoted heavily for saying the obvious.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Some people struggle with the difference between arguing about descriptive statements, about what things are, and arguing about normative statements, about what things should be. And these topics are nuanced.
Decompiling to learn functionality is fair use (because like I said in my previous comment, functionality can’t be copyrighted), but actually using and redistributing code (whether the original source code, the compiled binary derived from the source code, or decompiled code derived from the binary) is pretty risky from a legal standpoint. I’d advise against trying to build a business around the practice.