[fc417fc802]

Is copyright meaningful for aerospace software? I'm largely unfamiliar with that domain but I have trouble imagining that (for example) Boeing cares much about people redistributing or hacking on the control software for a 777. How would that impact their bottom line?

I could understand for medical devices maybe but even then it seems like the software is a tiny part of the overall cost of a given design. A competitor could already do a clean room reimplementation in that case.

But I guess it wouldn't be all that bad if there were a carefully crafted extension for government certified software that was explicitly tied to the length of the certification process.

[pixl97]

The only problem with this certified software exception is I foresee they'll write the law as "expiration timer starts when software has finished certification" then some lobby group will get the regulatory departments to adopt a new process of partial certification where said software is usable in devices but the 'finished certification' never gets reached so the copyright gets dragged out forever.

[PowerElectronix]

Nope, it falls more under trade secrets than copyright.

If you do something that requires stealing the code (publishing it, selling it, etc) the company can legally fuck you up.

Now, once it's in tbe wind, it becomes almost impossible to pursue from a practical point of view, as any implementer can claim trade secrets to avoid showing you the code.

[account42]

I think the point is more that many kinds of software (presumably including aerospace software) doesn't really need any kinds of protections from redistribution because it is effectively only useful for a specific design and much of the effort in creating it is not the algorithms that a competitor could steal without copyright or alternative protection but certifying that the software fits the rest of the system, which any competitor making use of the software would have to do again.

Also remember that the original point of copyright and patent protections is to encourage people to create the protected works in the first place but Boeing isn't just going to stop making aerospace software without copyright because their hardware will be useless without it. So if anything, any software that is needed for hardware made by the same company to function doesn't really have any right to be copyrightable at all.