Quote:
Originally Posted by longassname
While I'm being helpful I would like to make a correction to something said earlier in this thread so that nobody thinks it's ok to steal my tuning--I'm not especially thrilled when people use it to find rom locations but I understand some temptations are too great the resist. Using my actual tuning is another thing entirely.
It's long stood that unless explicity aggreed to in a terms of use aggreement that a user/owner of software can modify it to expand it's abilities or change it's abilities. When someone buys say a stage 1 from me they are buying a piece of hardware that allows the modification of the software on the ecu, the use of two tunes that can switched between, and a new tuning which expands the abilities of Subaru's original software. The sale of my product does not cause econic harm to Subaru by competing against them. What I am doing has long stood as legal in both US and international copyright precedent.
Now, if someone reads a copy of my software and then sells it in competition against me, or copies my software and further modifies it and then sells it in competion with me, or copies my software and uses the information learned from it to develop a competing product with reduced development costs...those actions have long stood as lillegal in both US and international copyright law.
I do have a masters degree in information systems so I have more knowledge about these things than most. To greatly simplify it for others there is a simple rule you can use to determine if you are in copyright violation. If your use of something someone has written causes them economic harm you are violating their copyright.
|
Micheal, you are the established guru in this area and your help and insight is always appreciated. I welcome any contribution you have to make.
As mentioned at least once in this thread.
Nobody here has any intention of competing with you or stealing your hard work. I am not selling bootleg copies of your ECUtune chips and I have not heard of anybody else doing so. There was an
unsubstantiated allegation about Budfreak wanting to do that, but I doubt that he has the expertise to do so on his own and I am certainly not going to help him.
I resent your accusation that I may have looked at your work to find variable locations. I assure you this is absolutely not the case. As a professional computer geek, I am perfectly capable of finding them myself. To give credit where it is due, I have learned a lot from reading the various threads that you have posted here about your work. I always enjoy reading your technical discussions.
I am not an expert on US or International copyright law, but I disagree with your interpretation. The amount of "economic harm" does not change the legality. Although it may affect whether the copyright owner decides to sue the infringer and how much damages are claimed.
I also do not believe that it is "your software", unless you are claiming to have entirely rewritten it from scratch. We both know that would be very hard to do and therefore I believe that you are distributing
Subaru's software, with a few changes. You cannot legally buy a book, change a couple of pages and then claim copyright over the whole book and sell it as your own work.
At best you can claim ownership over the bytes you have changed, but even that is tenuous because the fuel and timing maps are not a creative work. They are control parameters for the engine. The same values could be arrived at independantly by other tuners trying to acheive the same state of tune. If several tuners were asked to find the optimum tuning for an SVX engine, they would probably all come up with similar values.
If I decided to raise my rev limiter to 7400, would that mean that I copied part of your work? Or does it just mean that I think 7400 is an optimum value for the rev limit. Do you think that you should be the only person allowed to set the rev limit to 7400? Maybe I should stake a claim to values from 6800 through 7350?
OK. I'm being silly now. But the point I am trying to make is that it is hard to claim valid ownership of control parameters.
Regardless, this discussion is pointless. As already stated, I have no intention of ripping off your work, and nor do any of the other contributors to this thread. My repeated advice to anyone wanting an off-the-shelf tuning product is to go and buy one from Longassname. The research we are doing in this thread is simply intended to make it easier for people who want to mod their own ECU and TCU to their own requirements.
Phil.