[erez]

I just love that not only they copyrighted it, they even give excuses for it. You can't copyright someone else's work, regardless of how long you took to reverse-engineer it from disassembled binaries. Obviously the "rights owners" are not going to take those two guys to court (pity though, that would've been hilarious), but since the only reason those two could license this is that this is a computer virus and no one will claim authority, their claims to ownership of the code have no merit. I would love it if someone would publish or use it and not give them credit or "violate" the terms of the license in some manner, as I'd love to see those two try to claim their case.

[account42]

They DO have copyright on the reverse engineering work. But that doesn't mean that they don't have full copyright over the code which looking at the LICENSE file alone it looks they are claiming. There should at least be a copyright line mentioning the original authors, even if just "Unknown Authors". They also obviously don't have permission to redistribute their derivative or to create it in the first place.

Its also ironic that they expect others to follow their license when they are fine with ignoring the copyright of the original hackers.

Ultimately though, copyright as we have it today is extremely silly and all they are asking for is attribution which IMO should be the default.

[lupire]

Is the law clear in this? They created something different from the source material binary program.

[data_maan]

This. They don't give you the same as the original virus code, they give you different code (namely readable one), than apparently compiles to the virus assembly.

It's plausible this took effort, so I think it's only fair if they license it - it seems also ethically fair, since their licence is permissive.

[cafeinux]

I am sure big software companies wouldn't agree on this: decompile Excel or Photoshop and copyright the resulting code, and you shall get a nice lawsuit within days, if not hours. However, I guess there would have a bit of ToS breach, a pinch of DMCA and a lot of copyright infringement for reverse-engineering the software, maybe not that much for copyrighting the decompiled code.

[hellotomyrars]

They won’t agree and would file suit but legally this isn’t a highly tested area. The closest we get is Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. as far as I’m aware and that can be seen as more of a win for the reverse engineering than Sony. The particulars are but different to be sure though.

Realistically it unlikely that anyone would attempt to decompile and fully reverse engineer excel and attempt to package it as a product that they own. It just doesn’t make sense practically. But throwing something in Jira isn’t the same thing as actually putting in the work to reverse engineer it and make it effectively a perfect replication. You don’t unbake the cake, you can’t. You just figure out a process to end up with the same cake.

As for TOS goes, that’s its own other legal issue that has a mixed history erring on the side of TOS not actually being enforceable.

The people who did this work I think are fine to ask people to respect their license. They don’t have to worry about the US/Israel knocking at the door to tell them they can’t claim ownership anyways.

[ses1984]

Wouldn’t that be considered a derivative work? You can copyright those.

[ses1984]

I mean you cannot copyright derivative work.

[garyfirestorm]

its right at the front of the git repo

>but both of us spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours between ASM code trying to figure out what was behind those binaries and we are providing the product of our hard work (i.e. readable C code) to you for free

also

> It is not a simple job and it is not a short job, both our licenses are extremely permissive

>I'd like to ask you is that our job get recognized...show us your support by giving us credit for what we did

[Archelaos]

I do not know much about other jurisdictions, but in Germany a derived work has its individual copyright. For example, if one is translating a copyrighted work and publishes the translation without authorization, the translation is still prodected. The orginal copyright owner may sue the publisher of the translation, but the translator may sue anyone who publishes the translation without authorization.