Broadcom GPL violation

[Harald Welte]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 10:38:36AM -0800, snax wrote:
> I am in the process of reverse engineering the Windows driver for the
> Broadcom 4300 series wireless nic. I just discovered that they built in
> what appears to be an "anti-airsnort" defensive measure by stealing  a
> function out of airsnort.  Basically airsnort has an algorithm for
> recognizing a particular type of wireless packet and they stole the code
> to make sure they do not generate that type of packet.  While it is only
> six lines of source code, a large amount of research and effort went
> into developing the algorithm.

copyright is not to be confused with patents.  In some jurisdictiosn
suhc as the US you can get a patent on an algorithm, which would allow
you to prevent broadcom to use your algorithm.

Copyright is about a specific implementation of e.g. that algorithm.
Unless you can prove that they exactly copied those lines of code, you
will not be able to claim they violated your copyright.

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>          	        http://gnumonks.org/
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