Hi,
Wolfgang Roeckelein writes:
No, I was referring to a case, where a third party game cartridges manufacturer reverse engineered the specifications of the game cartridges slot for producing his own cartridges for this game.
Sounds like _Sega v. Accolade_, 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir., 1993).
I don't have it in front of me, but Terry Carroll's Copyright FAQ (ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/law/copyright/faq/part2) cites it for the proposition that dissasembly of a copyrighted work can be fair use if there is no other way to reach noncopyrightable (functional, not expressive) elements of an existing work.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out. I'm glad that I was right with Sega... Wolfgang --- Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Inf. Voice: +49 261 6509 173 Wolfgang Roeckelein Fax: +49 261 6509 179 WHU Koblenz E-Mail: roeckelein@wi.whu-koblenz.de Burgplatz 2 (NeXTmail ok) D-56179 Vallendar WWW: http://www.whu-koblenz.de/~wolfgang/ Germany --rsa--------------------------------8<------------------------------------- #!/usr/local/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-in-3-lines-PERL ($k,$n)=@ARGV;$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2% Sa2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*' ,$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n||die"$0 [-d] k n\n")&~1)/2) -------------------------------------8<------------------------------------- TRY: echo squeamish ossifrage | rsa -e 3 7537d365 | rsa -d 4e243e33 7537d365 Residents of the USA & France *MUST NOT* include this .sig if following up! *** Residents of France & Russia *MUST NOT* make any use of this -sig ! ***