Re: [Gimp-print-devel] release? and how to contact printer companies

[Robert L K. <rl...@al...>]

   From: sh...@al...
   Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 21:20:42 +0900

   >    Maybe the marketing people are really better concerning strategic
   >    decissions and we should concentrate on them. Perhaps we should
   >    start with designing a note to send to them? But what about the
   >    already reverse engineered code? Any legal problems to be expected?
   > 
   > What reverse engineered code?

   The windows software.  We're reverse engineering it by way of examining its
   output.

We're not reverse engineering the Windows software.  We're reverse
engineering the command set of the printer for purposes of
interoperability.

   As long as we don't generate the files ourselves, it's not our problem.
   The people who gave them to us, if they knew what we intended to do with
   them, could be hit with copyright violation charges.  At least in Virginia.

The UCITA bill there isn't law (unless it has actually been signed),
and in any event it isn't the law in Massachusetts (where I live).
Epson would have to claim copyright on the driver output, which seems
a bit of a stretch given that it's simply a mechanical translation of
another work.

I haven't read what Epson claims to be their license agreement, and I
don't intend to either because I'm not using their driver software.

There was a case recently (Sony against Connectix) where an appeals
court directed a district court to find in favor of Connectix, who
had engaged in much more direct reverse engineering of the CODE (not
merely the operation) of the Playstation.  If Connectix can be found
to have a right to disassemble the code itself (creating intermediate
copies of the actual copyrighted work), I'd think it very hard to
claim that we don't have a right to use the output as we wish (at
least for myself, since I don't have any possible contractual
agreement with Epson -- remember, I have not attempted to install
their software!)  See
http://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/web/newopinions.nsf/f606ac175e010d64882566eb00658118/06d1e0893fdee11688256881006296b8?OpenDocument
for the text of that decision.

In any event, the Ghostscript Uniprint driver also does softweaving,
so we're not the first to do so.

I feel safe enough here (and the large majority, if not the entirety,
of the new Epson code is mine) so that I'm not interested in
contacting a lawyer myself, but if it's something people are concerned
about, they should do so.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rl...@al...>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lp...@uu...
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton