Hacker News Reader

Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

The real lesson here is that they should have pirated the SAS software instead of licensing it. Then they would have been liable for at most a large fine instead of having their business shut down.

If the license was tightly integrated with the software (meaning even a pirated copy would require acceptance before use) then just hire an outside consulting company to generate the output from the test code. It could have all been documented and left the company with clean hands.

The simplicity of side stepping the license in this case highlights the absurdity of the ruling.

Not saying SAS wouldn't still sue them, but they wouldn't have nearly as strong a case with damages less likely to be bankrupting.

View on HN

> The real lesson here is that they should have pirated the SAS software instead of licensing it.

That's a perverse but probably accurate reading of the situation.

It reminds me of patent advice I've received: never look at a competitor's patents, or even speculate about them. Damages in a patent lawsuit go way up if the infringement was willful, which is automatically assumed if you know about the patent.

This is generally what lawyers recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design -- although this is generally done to avoid copyright complaints, not license complaints.

But per your link "Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design."

They did reverse engineer the code instead of infringing copyright. The problem is that it violated a license prohibition on reverse engineering. I'm not going to claim that the judges interpreted the law incorrectly, but I think that this legal result is overall bad for society. It means that a company can stifle competition even if potential competitors avoid violating copyright or patents.

If they had pirated the software, then they wouldn't violated a license prohibition since they wouldn't have agreed to it.

I'm wondering how what they did is different from clean room design where the clean room is just intensely close to the non-clean room.

I've worked for companies that created subsidiaries with the sole intent of purchasing competitors products with the intent to reverse-engineer them and do competitive performance analysis. Good legal counsel probably would have suggested the same.

That's interesting. I'd probably favor making the other company as disconnected as possible instead of a straight sub, but that difference may not matter much.

Even if they did shut down, couldn't they just rebootstrap as another LLC add do it the "right" way this time?

Late reply, but one problem here is that the ruling against the company could give SAS them the right to take ownership of the software as a creditor to a company with no assets left other than the code.

Lots of complexities there, but the root of the issue is that you can't pull a company's main asset out from under legitimate creditors. And SAS will soon be a big creditor as soon as the ruling is final and they get a monetary judgment that the company presumably won't be able to pay.

There are lots of ways companies try to evade this basic principle, but none that can withstand the scrutiny of a court and motivated, financed creditor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com