Clean-Room RTMPE Spec Created From rtmpdump

lkcl writes "A clean-room RTMPE specification has been created using the source code of rtmpdump-v1.6 for guidance. Adobe recently issued a DMCA take-down notice against SourceForge, resulting in copies of rtmpdump hitting quite a few bittorrent sites worldwide."

Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

IANAL, etc. but my distinct impression was that cleanrooming wouldn't(outside of curious edge cases) save you from the DMCA. For copyright claims, the more layers of cleanroom, the better; but the DMCA only cares if the code constitutes a circumvention device or not. It could be based on a cracked copy of some proprietary adobe tool, OSS based on network sniffing of the proprietary tool, written according to a spec based on the OSS implementation, or, for that matter, produced by the Oracle of Delphi based on instructions from Olympus.

WTF is RTMPE?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to post an article about some obscure bullshit nobody's ever heard of, you could at least give people some hint at WTF you're talking about. "RTMPE" doesn't even show up on Wikipedia. God forbid you elaborate your terse, two sentence summary.

Re:Why?

[h4rr4r]

That is easy to deal with, just hand off the spec to a developer outside the USA. The DMCA does not matter anywhere else.

Academic RTMP discussion?

[Qubit]

Just as Prof. David Touretzky has his Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers [cmu.edu], perhaps some other CS Prof would like to put up a website talking about the protocol?

I haven't looked at the code yet, but I'd assume that the bulk of it is considered acceptable by Adobe. So what small piece of it is the target of Adobe's DMCA takedown? Is it something that we can put on a T-shirt? :-)

Re:WTF is RTMPE?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. Providing an introduction to what you're about to discuss is covered in probably 5th grade English. It's pretty basic shit.

If the "editor" or submitter wanted me to take their information seriously they should have given some idea of what they were talking about. As it stands, all I got out of the summary was "OMG! Here are some links to illegal content on torrent sites." If it's as important as they seem to think, maybe they should expend the extra 30 seconds of effort and explain why I should give a shit. As it stands, illegal stuff on a torrent site isn't very earth shattering news.

Re:Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

True enough. In that case, though, why bother with the cleanrooming? rtmpdump can simply be hosted offshore, as I'm sure it already is.

Re:WTF is RTMPE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clean room reverse engineering is where you reverse engineer things using no code from the project you are attempting to emulate. This is used to make sure your project is 100% legal.

Well, sort of. You can be 100% sure you're not infringing copyright. But many other laws can apply, such as patents or the DMCA.

And this project seems to be a circumventing technology and illegal under the DMCA.

Re:WTF is RTMPE?

[hazem]

It's a common problem with the summaries on slashdot that less-common acronyms are not explained. The world of nerds is pretty vast and it's impossible for all of us to keep up with every possible acronym, system, software, etc.

It would have been trivial to add ", a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet," right after the first instance of RTMPE and it would have made the summary much more useful and informative.

Re:Someone doesn't know what "clean room" means

[jonaskoelker]

So in other words,

1. party A translates source code to English
2. party B translates English into source code
3. the IP is lost in translation

Right?