The Exclusive Rights of the Author of a Computer Program
The legal protection of software in Georgia operates under the Law of Georgia on Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: code, as a work, is an object of copyright. Under Article 19, the author of a computer program enjoys, together with the general rights of copyright, the exclusive right to carry out, authorize or prohibit the reproduction of the computer program by any means and in any form, in whole or in part — and where such reproduction is needed for the loading, display, operation, transmission or storage of the program, the author's consent is required.
The author holds the same right over the translation of the program from one programming language into another, its adaptation, arrangement or other alteration: these actions too are impermissible without consent, and the reproduction of the results of a change takes place under the protection of the rights of the person who alters the program. Article 19 also covers the authors of databases: they hold the exclusive rights of temporary or permanent reproduction, translation, adaptation, arrangement, distribution, public transmission, display and performance of the database.
The Boundaries of Decompilation
On the page of protecting a program author's rights the question often arises whether reverse engineering is lawful. Under Article 29, a person who lawfully possesses a copy of a computer program may, without the consent of the author and without payment of a royalty, carry out decompilation — reproducing and transforming the object code into the source text — and commission decompilation to other persons, in one situation only: where it is necessary to achieve interoperability between a program created independently by that person and other programs.
This permission is bounded by strict conditions: the action is carried out by a person entitled to use the copy; the information necessary for interoperability has not previously been readily available from other sources; the decompilation concerns only those parts necessary for interoperability; and the information obtained is used only to achieve interoperability — its transfer to other persons, or its use to develop a new program substantially similar to the decompiled one, is prohibited.