D3DXCreateTeapot and reverse engineering?

[David Gerard]

On 18 July 2010 21:56, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k at gmail.com> wrote:

> Others have mentioned before that the only 'reverse' engineering
> method we allow is black box reverse engineering. Technically this is
> black box, but I would say that you can't use the output because of
> copyright reasons.


In the US, a public domain dataset cannot be made copyright by a
machine transformation, per Bridgeman v. Corel. Wikimedia has dealt
with this one extensively - running the data through a Microsoft
machine transformation absolutely does not establish a new copyright.
This is established law.

In other countries, it is less certain. However, approximately no-one
is willing to risk their asserted copyrights trying it out. The last
one Wikimedia had was the National Portrait Gallery making legal
threats, and merely making the threat got them pretty much ostracised
by the museum and academic community and Wikimedia are about the only
people still on speaking terms with them, 'cos we love everybody and
approached their foolish legal aggression as an error ;-)


- d.