[d at DCC] Canadian law on software disassembly

[Denver Gingerich]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 9:55 PM, Russell McOrmond <russell at flora.ca> wrote:
>
>    IANAL, TINLA, and all that -- in fact, I thought one of the actual
>  lawyers or law students would have jumped in to spare my speculation.
[...]
>    My guess is that your situation is covered by the following section
>  of the Canadian copyright act
>
>  ---cut---
>
>  30.6  It is not an infringement of copyright in a computer program for a
>  person who owns a copy of the computer program that is authorized by the
>  owner of the copyright to
>
>  (a) make a single reproduction of the copy by adapting, modifying or
>  converting the computer program or translating it into another computer
>  language if the person proves that the reproduced copy is
>
>  (i) essential for the compatibility of the computer program with a
>  particular computer,
[...]
>    Specifically (a)(i) given you are adapting the program to run on your
>  hardware.  Disassembly isn't a relevant issue as that isn't an activity
>  generally understood as regulated by copyright, any more than reading a
>  book could be thought of as regulated by copyright.  It is theoretically
>  copyright regulated copying/communications/etc that you need to be
>  concerned with, including derived works.
>
>    There is also a practical consideration: given the fairly high amount
>  of activities that are non-controversially copyright infringement (IE:
>  people installing/using royalty-bearing proprietary software without
>  paying for it/etc), it isn't like your speculative situation is ever
>  going to be a high priority to challenge.

I have definitely considered this point.  As it seems is the trend
with the free software community, I would like to strictly adhere to
all applicable laws.  However, if there is an area of law that is
unclear where some interpretations of it would severely restrict my
ability to proceed with my project, then it may make sense to ignore
such interpretations and proceed anyway.

It seems that Vivendi (the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment,
creators of StarCraft) is primarily concerned with projects that could
reduce sales of their products, as most companies are.  For example,
Vivendi filed a lawsuit against the creators of bnetd, an open source
Battle.net server, which would allow people to play online without a
CD key check, making it easier to use pirated software.  Vivendi also
filed a lawsuit against the creators of Freecraft, which had virtually
identical gameplay to Warcraft II but used all its own graphics so it
did not require users to purchase Warcraft.  The creators of Freecraft
created a separate project, Wargus, that used Warcraft II graphics
(requiring a Warcraft II CD), which has so far been free from
litigation.

There are a lot of StarCraft modifications out there that require
disassembly of the game to add new units or features but require the
original game to work.  I have not heard of any lawsuits against such
projects.

>  You obviously need to keep
>  your modifications to yourself and not distribute them (ie: distribute
>  something derived from the original program without permission), but
>  private modification is something that will be hard to challenge.

I think there may be a way to get around the distribution limitation
you outlined.  My plan is to distribute a program (and probably source
code) that contains only code I wrote and knowledge of where in the
StarCraft executable it needs to insert the modifications.  The user
would pass the program a StarCraft executable (which the user obtained
legally) that the program would modify appropriately.  This produces a
StarCraft executable that cannot be redistributed (it is a derivative
of a work that is under copyright) but should allow the program that
performs the modification to be redistributed freely.

The solution I outline above is similar to an artist adding a bass
line to a song but then distributing only a recording of the bass line
and software to add that bass line to the original song.  This would
appear to be legal because the artist is not redistributing the
original copyrighted work, only his or her original work to be used
with the complete song.

I would appreciate comments on the legality of the above scenarios.

Denver