Messages in this thread |  | | From | "Grant R. Guenther" <> | Subject | "legal" advice required | Date | Fri, 27 Dec 1996 16:41:08 -0500 (EST) |
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I've been sent a parallel port CDrom device with the request that I develop a Linux driver for it. The device is a "Power CD" from Freecom, which I believe to be in Berlin. Apparently it is widely available at discount stores in Germany. I have followed my usual procedures and developed a driver by reverse engineering the protocol transactions on the parallel bus. As one would expect, the drive is a stock ATAPI drive combined with a small custom component that implements an IDE over parallel bus protocol.
The Freecom driver does something unusual for devices of this sort: it begins by pulsing, one bit at a time, a sequence of 14827 bits into the adapter. At first glance this would appear to be the program for a microcontroller of some sort, although it looks odd - more than 80% of the bits are ones. I suspect it is more likely to be a table that controls a finite state machine.
I suppose I ought to take the conservative path and consider this byte stream to be "code", and not part of a protocol transaction. My understanding of situations like this is that to be subject to copyright protection, code must clearly carry - in plain text - a notice of it's copyright status. No obvious rendering of this bit stream produces any intelligible text.
I don't disassemble drivers - but I can report that in this case, the precise sequence that I have obtained from my analysis of the protocol transactions occurs verbatim in the body of the .SYS file that comes with the drive. That driver does, of course, contain a copyright.
Now, this presents me with a problem. I can build a driver that doesn't contain the initialisation sequence - assuming that the user will initialise the drive with the DOS driver - and then boot into Linux.
I could also provide a small tool to extract the sequence from the from the DOS driver and make a suitable data definition to be included in the driver - so people who have the DOS driver can build a Linux driver that contains the initialisation sequence.
Or, I could include the binary sequence as a data definition - since it is unintelligible on its own, is useless without the device itself, and carries no intrinsic copyright.
In the interest of ease of use - especially considering it will most often be newcomers who want to use this thing - I'd prefer to take the third option.
I know some of these issues have been discussed before, but I'd like to hear opinions and recommendations.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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