Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5

I believe that the best way to bring issues to light is pull request. Second best is the issue. Comment on Hacker News is somewhere down the list

Yes, Microsoft bought Skype, it didn't create Skype. There have been many substantive changes since then (e.g. much less peer-to-peer in operation).

I meant the whole block not just this phrase. "Copyright (c) 2009 by VEST Corporation. All rights reserved. Strictly Confidential!" - that conflicts with openness. Or at least with assigning rights to other people.

Right. And furthermore, Discord is free and totally propped up by investor money. Which means the day will come when the experience is totally ruined in an attempt to make money, as fast as possible.

Of course, I still willingly use Discord despite this - because it generally just works (even in browser) and has an extensive feature set, and is relatively easy to use. (this is among friends who aren't technical, so ease-of-use is a large factor). Previously I used Mumble, but indeed, it's a bit of a fickle beast for things that should be fairly automated (like configuring your voice inputs, etc).

Most of the issues were mostly in the setup of the hardware. I did run my own server on DO though.

> One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations.

How is the first team compensated? or am I missing something?

>This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers.

Very interesting. Does anyone have a link to a write up on this? or at least have a place to start looking for info on it?

As the author said, the files violating copyright are easy to replace. Let Skype ask for it, it will be 2 more days of work.

The reason why people want to see a clean room implementation is because they are afraid of patent and anticipate US-like silliness like Oracle claiming copyright on an API. Now that this is a very US-specific issue. If you don't plan to market to US, you can just ignore the issue.

I used to work for a French AR company. We were successful and at one point we planned to open offices in the US, but even without having done that, we already had received two frivolous claims by people based in the US (one who claimed he patented the idea of replaying the video at a varying speed). This delayed a bit our opening to the US and the first US employee was... a lawyer.

Do you realize that patents and copyright hell is the reason why, for more than a decade, VLC, a project made by French students, was better at playing videos than Microsoft's player, even when this was seen as crucial? Because France did not have to care for patent litigation.

I have exploited several products that align closely with protocols and/or brand names used by large companies. For every single product, I have received a request to take down my product. And in every single case, after my (kickass, I must add) IP lawyer wrote them a reply, they went away.

As long as you didn't use any of the original Skype code, you have nothing to fear (if you're based in Europe)

It's not a derivative of the presentation of the artistic elements of a work. It's derived from the technical working of a piece of software.

The elements of the software doing novel technical stuff might be patented, but copying the technical working is allowed. Copyright doesn't protect technical aspects.

If the project copies the UK of Skype, then that's a tort. If it copies the written code or uses the human reading of that code to derive a new codebase, then that's a tort. If it copies the technical implementation, how memory is accessed, what codecs are used, what packets are sent and when ... that's not copyright infringement.

Probably. No DMCA here.

I'm not entirely sure of that. If you would have two teams though, it would. Team A creates a spec of the protocol, and Team B implements a connection lib based on the spec created by Team A.

Europe tends to be pretty good through, copyright wise.

Disassembly by a team that results in new code written by the same team is not legal in any country that enforces copyrights. That includes the EU. Possibly excludes Russia and probably excludes China unless the owner is a large Chinese company.

In fact I'd be surprised if this code isn't taken off GitHub by a DCMA from Microsoft, as soon as it hits their lawyers' radars.

Copyright extends beyond the US, due to certain treaties.

But yes, Antigua's IT industry could get very interesting if they get to keep the whole copyright haven thing going.

I don't know much about Russian copyright law, but at least the idea of the German copyright law (Urheberrechtsgesetz) is very different from the US one. Here the central concept is the "Urheberschaft" (authorship; this implies that you have to be acknowledged as author) which cannot be sold, donated, refused etc. (as opposed to in the copyright law). The only thing that can be sold are the Nutzungsrechte (rights of use), which allow to redistribute the work and make money from it. Thus in Germany there exists for example no analogue to public domain work: Since Urheberschaft cannot be donated, one simply cannot put works under public domain, see for example https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

I suppose it depends on where you are. IIRC some countries explicitly allow reverse engineering for interoperability. Which is arguably the case here.

(Side note: That any kind of reversing is illegal anywhere at all is by itself a testament of the sad state most legislatures are in.)

ToS only applies to terms of continuing use of a service, if you're prepared to not be an user anymore, then the conditons of ToS are not worth the paper they're (not) written on, you can simply not accept those terms. Click-through and shrink-wrap licencing terms are not binding almost everywhere (they likely could be in USA, though).

And while USA has DMCA, in most of the world copyright (as according to Berne convention) doesn't prohibit reverse engineering but only grants a limited monopoly on copying with some exceptions - often including interoperability, so you can do that even if the copyright holder disagrees.

Reversing are explicitly allowed in EU government as other based human laws.

I mean, EU have a much more great priority then Skype TOS.

If someone will add to Skype TOS "and please dont breath or dont go to toilets during use of our application". It will have zero effects in legal meaning. Because it break upfront law and United Nations based rights and etc.

tldr;

They just try to fear you with "dont do this" thing.