Hi Krzysztof,

i would simply ask David Zicarelli (zicarell@cycling74.com), the Max/MSP mastermind. He has proven to be very cooperative in all cases where i needed his support.

best greetings, Thomas

----- Original Message ----- From: "Krzysztof Czaja" czaja@chopin.edu.pl To: "pd-dev" pd-dev@iem.kug.ac.at Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 4:50 PM Subject: [PD-dev] importing max binary files

hi all,

cyclone now loads max binary files, which is nice in itself -- but is it legal? Perhaps I am doing something very stupid?

Hardly any reverse engineering involved -- just looking into the files, and comparing with same patches saved as max text -- was pretty obvious, actually.

So I will wait now for your opinions before uploading a snapshot.

Krzysztof

---

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On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Krzysztof Czaja wrote:

cyclone now loads max binary files, which is nice in itself -- but is it legal? Perhaps I am doing something very stupid? Hardly any reverse engineering involved -- just looking into the files, and comparing with same patches saved as max text -- was pretty obvious, actually.

This _is_ reverse engineering; however alot of people confuse reverse-engineering and decompilation. Reverse-engineering is merely applying the scientific method to figure out how engineered products work instead of applying it to figure out the universe. Decompilation is more like peeking under the hood (and we surely can't do that with the universe. At least not now. We haven't found the hood of the universe yet!)

By any standards, reverse-engineering is much less likely to be illegal than decompilation. It is very much debatable whether decompilation ought to be illegal, and so, the status of that is highly country-specific. I would not think it's covered by standard copyright law, which, as the name suggests, is about "Copy Rights", not "Analysis Rights", the latter being covered by more recent laws (of dubious justifiability and applicability).

________________________________________________________________ Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju