[MPlayer-users] QT Cinepak Decoding

[Daniel A. Nagy]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2001 at 03:49:52PM +0100, Attila Kinali wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Oct 2001 20:47:12 +0200 (CEST) Arpi <arpi at thot.banki.hu> wrote:
> 
> > > hmm but xanim license imho forbids reverse engineering og the codecs and I 
> > > guess this is a form of it.
> > 
> > Hmm. which license allows reverse engineering? :)
> 
> Hmm.. Swiss law explicitly allows reverse engineering
> for interoperability proposes...
> Too bad i dont have the time for it. Any volunteers
> who'd like to come over here ? 
> (no, that's not a joke)

I'm no big guru on licensing (I'm an engineer, after all, not a lawyer
:-), but AFAIK, the license agreements are not binding "AS IS", but
they should comply with the local law. In short: the law has precedence
over licenses. Many countries, not just Switzerland, allow reverse
engineering, no matter what a particular license says.

Although I don't know the Hungarian law either, but I'm pretty sure that
it will be extremely hard and time consuming to actually prosecute
someone for reverse engineering in Hungary. Even in Canada, some
closed-source licenses are hardly enforcable.

The licensing nirvana, however, is Mother Russia: no intellectual
property there, so once you got hold of a piece of code, you do whatever
you want (or are able) to do with it. It's the law! Or at least it's
been the law during the eighties and early nineties. Is it still the
case, Nick?

-- 
Daniel