| ▲ | jonhohle an hour ago | |
None of the original source code exists in these projects. It’s all created from scratch. Copyright for this new code is owned by the person doing decompilation. No one knows how similar to the original it is or not, just that it compiles to the same output. | ||
| ▲ | rcxdude an hour ago | parent [-] | |
It's not an obvious legal argument that it is not a derivative work of the compiled code or the original source code that produced that. Clean room reverse engineering is meant to give you a strong argument for that, and while it's not necessarily required to prevail against a copyright case (or actually sufficient) it's gonna make things harder if you don't. (All of this is made more murky because copyright is meant to only cover expressions of human creativity, and code is kind of a mix of creativity and mechanical details: the clean room approach is meant to separate out the mechanical details) Also, If it is an unauthorized derivative work, as I understand it then it might not even qualify for copyright protection itself. | ||