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Do you have a right to privacy of your source code?

cstanton

As an individual, if you write a program and share the binary of that, should the expectancy be that you share its source code?

You might not want to share the source code, for example, you can very easily be judged based on that source code, both professionally and personally.

I've known people purposefully not post their code on Git Hub because they know employers will scrutinize and judge it, and in fact others observe how many 'regular commits' you do. Whether or not such judgment is fair is out of scope, but it's certainly something that's in the public eye at that point.

So perhaps you release a compiled binary because you want to help, but you don't want to invite conversations about the code, make it publicly displayed, or maybe there are other reasons.

However, someone comes along, decompiles the binary, reverse engineers it with ida pro, and releases the source code - citing that they have every right to do that, and now everyone can see the code, even though it's against your wishes.

Who was in the wrong? Or was no one in the wrong? Does it go to copyright since there was no license? Or was there an implied license?

There certainly appears to be a strong sense of justice among those online, that insists "it's just code" and "there's a right to transparency".

But there feels like there's something here that may not stand up to this scrutiny and this cavalier attitude of someone's work. Comparatively in the art world, someone creates a piece of art, and recently those components are being re-used in the case of AI (stable diffusion) and there's an uproar, but aren't they just laying the components bare? Maybe the analogy doesn't quite fit, but it certainly feels like for some reason code, by some, is treat differently to other mediums. Even though there are patents, copyrights, licenses, etc.

It could be difficult or even impossible for an individual to do something about this without financial backing, too. Especially compared to companies.

What do you think?

Edit: If you're picking up on spelling errors rather than the topic and context of the post, you're easily distracted. ;)

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  • cstanton said:
    Edit: If you're picking up on spelling errors rather than the topic and context of the post, you're easily distracted. ;)

    Quite the opposite - I thought you may had found a new tool that I was unaware of

    Have you had a play with Ghidra yet ?

    cstanton said:
    Comparatively in the art world

    Comparatively in the engineering world, I guess you could buy an engine, strip it down, see how it works, modify it to improve its performance/reliability and then re-sell it for a large profit as a 'tuned engine'.

    Back in the art world, if you took a photograph of a sculpture of an engine and tried to sell it, you could be found to be in breach of copyright.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    The photograph is an interesting analogy on this.

    If I post a photograph to the internet somewhere, then even though I don't claim copyright on that photograph or put any legal terms on it, it remains mine. There are a number of cases where the copyright on a photograph can be retroactively applied even though the photographer might not have posted it with lots of legalese around it.

    An argument could easily be made that the same is true for code and code snippets. Just because it wasn't posted with usage allowances doesn't mean it's free to use.

    There was a massive bit of chaos caused a few years back because someone pulled code that previously was free to use. It's an interesting read to anyone interested in the subject. Leftpad. In that particular case, he pulled it and then the hosting site republished it.

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  • in reply to beacon_dave

    The photograph is an interesting analogy on this.

    If I post a photograph to the internet somewhere, then even though I don't claim copyright on that photograph or put any legal terms on it, it remains mine. There are a number of cases where the copyright on a photograph can be retroactively applied even though the photographer might not have posted it with lots of legalese around it.

    An argument could easily be made that the same is true for code and code snippets. Just because it wasn't posted with usage allowances doesn't mean it's free to use.

    There was a massive bit of chaos caused a few years back because someone pulled code that previously was free to use. It's an interesting read to anyone interested in the subject. Leftpad. In that particular case, he pulled it and then the hosting site republished it.

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  • in reply to Dudley

    Yes, under the Berne convention if you create an original expression in a tangible medium then you automatically have copyright. You don not have to mark your intent to copyright it. Although as Doug mentioned, it can make life easier in court if you do.

    The photograph of a sculpture was a case that cropped up in a Berne convention course I did about fifteen years ago. Someone had photographed a sculpture in public and then tried to sell it and was taken to court for potential breach of copyright. Although the photographer had copyright on the photograph they had taken, the sculptor had copyright on the subject material being photographed and the court decided that by selling the photograph the sculptor potentially lost out financially on their work and so the photographer was in breach of the copyright of the sculptor as they had not sought appropriate permission to use their copyrighted work. The fact that the sculptor had no intention of profiting by selling their own photographs, was seen as irrelevant.

    About the only useful thing I took away from the course was that you are automatically granted copyright without declaring intent, that breach of copyright can only be determined in a court of law, and that lawyers tend to profit from this either way.

    I'm surprised that the virtual Library of Babel by Jonathan Basile has not kicked up a storm as that potentially shows that a bidirectional algorithm can generate the same content even before it has been created. The text of this post I have just written here, already existed in the virtual library before I even wrote it.