Hi, From: Bill Trost <trost@cloud.rain.com>

Wolfgang Roeckelein writes:

...

I wasn't aware that you could copyright an algorithm. Patent, yes, but not copyright. Intellectual property meens secret, right? Aren't there any precendence cases involving propriety schemes that are reverse engineered?

Game cartridges (I think sega was involved)

You might be referring to Nintendo vs. Galoob, which was used as a sample case in an January 1994 article in the Communications of the ACM titled "Copyright's Fair use Doctrine and Digital Data". The article states

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. Unfortunatly, I have lost the reference and the names of the companies, but this is the main case cited when it comes to reverse engineering propriety schemes. Maybe I can dig this out, or another member of the list has details available. 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 ! ***