Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/August 28

Today in 1992 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided in the Sega vs. Accolade case. The ruling allows the copying and reverse engineering of copyrighted code for legitimate reasons as fair use if it is necessary for finding out the (unprotectable) “ideas and functional elements” of a program code. It also helped to establish that functional principles of computer software cannot be protected by copyright law.