question about copyright and code, is this legal?

[Ivan Leo Murray-Smith]

I think it depends where you live. If you aren't copying any original code you
aren't violating copyright. In the EU (This includes the UK so I doubt that this
http://www.winehq.org/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/10/0076.html can apply to the
UK), even if you disassemble something to understand how it works and write
something that does the same thing, it's legal, so until you aren't doing
copy/paste from the original code you're OK, even if you've read it to see how
it works. In places where software patents are valid, you may be breaking the
law, if that software is patented(DMCA?).