[longassname]

Hello Phil,

That's all I was trying to clear up. From everything I was taught in several graduate courses the view you had expressed earlier and just did again on software copyright is dead wrong. It's also contrary to the legal opinion that was given to me when incorporating ECUtune.


I am not selling the Subaru software. As the owners of SVX ecu's my customers already own the Subaru software. I am selling modifications to the software and hardware which enables those modifications and multiple tunes. If this was an OBDII engine management system then I would be selling a flash dongle which applied the changes without rewriting the Subaru software; however, since it is an OBDI system the base code and modifications must be packaged together. This isn't a problem since in order to use it you must actually already own an SVX ECU.

I very certainly can claim copyright on my modifications. That does not mean that if one were to figure out where the rev limit data is stored on their own and wanted to change that data to equal 7400 rpms and figure out how to do so on their own that they could not do so. It does mean that someone could not use my software to figure out the location, and or what to change the data to, and then do so.

So anyway..the rule of thumb I gave before isn't mine; it's not something I made up. It's an accepted rule of thumb. You may note that in the examples you gave that were supposed to sound rediculous they did not meet the rule of thumb because they did not involve the use of someone elses work. If your use of someone elses work causes them financial harm then you are violating their copyright. If your completely independent work produces the same results of someone else you haven't used their work and haven't met the rule of thumb.

The reason I am trying to make this clear is because while you may do your own work I am not as confident as you that nobody else will use your work to steal my work. They should know that if they do so...whether they sell my work or email it to people for free, or post it for others to have for free they will be liable for all financial losses I might ever suffer as a result.

Originally Posted by b3lha

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.