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

Someone I know has the same problem, I was able to give him an ancient EPROM programmer, I don't know how long it will last it's so old, but he gets good use out of it. He has a repair business but also does some enthusiast car sports work on the side, and needed them for the older cars, because he would want to tune them up for better performance etc.

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.

So there is no copyright for binary code. Or binary representations, because any particular binary string can have an infinite number of possible interpretations (i.e., your compiled version of a+b=c on machine 1, could mean d*e<7 on machine 2), or your ASCII version of tic-tac-toe might be blackjack in EBCDIC (or some other encoding in the 2**[char bits] space).

If we want to get to constitutional issues of IP, the purpose of IP is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." But we only promote progress by dissemination, and we don't do that unless we publish source code (in the case of algorithms, etc.) So I would say that someone who reverse engineers is actually performing a public service, and DCMA is unconstitutional on it's face; go after someone for copying your source, or for violating your patent, but not for determining how you did something (which in fact may be done in order to determine if you have, in fact, violated a patent!).

beacon_dave said:

Presumably it was compiled with debug information included ?

Not explicitly.

Presumably it was compiled with debug information included ?

baldengineer said:

"How many (actually) enforce copyright laws?"

That is where it will depend on the copyright holder's bank balance.

beacon_dave said:

If you decompile from a binary then you are likely to get a source that includes all the optimisations that the compiler included when compiling. So it will look very different (

I had a recent exact example of this.

A compiled binary I had shared was reversed, and it produced the exact same source code as was used to create it.

Character for character. It wasn't an overly complex piece of code.

It appears this varies depending on the compiler and tools used, and the intention to obfuscate

cstanton said:

Is it a new work if it looks exactly the same and does the same function?

You and I could both write a 'blinky' sketch that performs the same functionality. We'd each automatically have copyright on our version of the source code. 

Now decompile each binary and compare the source.

cstanton said:

It's possible to get that from decompiling back to the source.

If you decompile from a binary then you are likely to get a source that includes all the optimisations that the compiler included when compiling. So it will look very different (and often appear to do things in strange ways just because it takes less clock cycles to do it that way).

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.

There is a substantial shift to leasing of cars as opposed to owning them outright. I guess this will be more of the case when moving to autonomous vehicles if the company is legally responsible for accidents and wants to ensure they are only maintained by approved dealers. Either that or it will become more of an autonomous taxi based type service.

However bang goes your classic car, or custom car scene in that case. But it may kick-start a personal transporter / kit car type scene.