[PD-dev] importing max binary files

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Krzysztof Czaja wrote:
> cyclone now loads max binary files, which is nice in itself -- but is
> it legal?  Perhaps I am doing something very stupid? Hardly any
> reverse engineering involved -- just looking into the files, and
> comparing with same patches saved as max text -- was pretty obvious,
> actually.

This _is_ reverse engineering; however alot of people confuse
reverse-engineering and decompilation. Reverse-engineering is merely
applying the scientific method to figure out how engineered products work
instead of applying it to figure out the universe. Decompilation is
more like peeking under the hood (and we surely can't do that with the
universe. At least not now. We haven't found the hood of the universe
yet!)

By any standards, reverse-engineering is much less likely to be illegal
than decompilation. It is very much debatable whether decompilation ought
to be illegal, and so, the status of that is highly country-specific. I
would not think it's covered by standard copyright law, which, as the name
suggests, is about "Copy Rights", not "Analysis Rights", the latter being
covered by more recent laws (of dubious justifiability and applicability).

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju