RE: hacker copyrights was [RE: telnetd exploit code]

[woods () weird com (Greg A. Woods)]

[ On Wednesday, July 25, 2001 at 20:27:51 (-0400), Eric D. Williams wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: hacker copyrights was [RE: telnetd exploit code]
>
> With all do respect it is clear the case especially the Godwin ref. are not 
> directly material to the issue / topic here but rather the application of the 
> principles herein as you discussed.

Well I see the Godwin article as primarily discussing whether or not
crackers can get in trouble by publishing some document that they find
through their (illegal) efforts, and as such only marginally applicable
to the quite opposite question posed here.

>  I am not clear on what your allusion to 
> self-propagating worm is here, I believe this thread started where a question 
> was asked whether a cracker would be protected from scrutiny by copyright.

The question that opened this thread, IIRC, was asking whether or not
someone publishing an analysis of a worm or virus would be violating the
copyright of worm/virus author.  The original question also asked if the
worm/virus code could be shared.

Under normal circumstances, in at least many modern "Western" legal
jurisdictions, copyright is implict and does not have to be registered
to be valid.  This means that a virus/worm author has implicitly
reserved all of their rights under copyright law even if they don't
include any kind of copyright licensing notice.  So the original
question was indeed partly on-track w.r.t. whether or not the worm/virus
code could be shared.  While strictly speaking it's probably not legal
to make more copies of the worm/virus code to share with other analysts,
that doesn't mean you can't "show" your copy to them.  However as I've
argued it would seem that due to the nature of worm/virus self-
propagation the author must implictly relinquish his or her right to
control redistribution, at least free redistribution, since nobody can
prove one way or another how some second analyst might have obtained a
copy of the code when all initial distribution is anonymous (and free).

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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