I know most of you are not lawyers, but I am interested in your opinions.
We all know that software is copyrighted and that it is illegal to duplicate
a program. This goes for either the binaries or source code. It, after
all, would be illegal to use someone's source code in my application without
their permissions.
The other day I was using Reflector to disassemble an assembly because I
wanted to see how something was accomplished by the assembly's author. Now,
as I looked at the disassembled code that Reflector provides, I began to ask
myself, does copyright law apply to what I was seeing? After all, could I
have used the code that Reflector was displaying? Since Reflector does not
have access to the original source, Reflector's algorithm generates what it
thinks would be correct code, but this is not necessarily the code that was
written by the developer, therefore, was it copyrighted?