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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Publishing decompiled source code (of copyrighted works) is a clear violation of copyright law. The problem is not the reverse engineering or decompiling, the problem is also not the name (that might be illegal, too, but it wasn’t complained about), the problem is that copyrighted works were published.

Copyright law doesn’t really care about what you do with copyrighted works as long as you don’t make what you did public.

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> Copyright law doesn’t really care about what you do with copyrighted works as long as you don’t make what you did public.

My understanding of the DMCA is that if there's any copyright access control (DRM, etc.), you're not allowed to attempt to circumvent that protection mechanism. Not even recreationally, privately..

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584617

Copyright law doesn’t really care about what you do with copyrighted works as long as you don’t make what you did public.

Au contraire. The only reason you can rip a CD and put it on your computer is because of the doctrine of fair use. Without it, copyright law most definitely says you are not allowed to make unauthorized copies, period. What you do with them is not relevant.

It’s a simplification of copyright law (which is bloody complicated) that is, in general, true. (As you yourself said, you can rip a CD. It’s perfectly legal. Uploading said ripped CD to a server and publishing the link is not. Fair use is part of the copyright law. The only reason you can rip a CD is because of copyright law – just what I said.)

>The only reason you can rip a CD is because of copyright law Without copyright law you could rip a CD...

Note that the software's EULA comes into play, as well. It could very well have a clause that disallows reverse-engineering or decompiling altogether.

EULA's are private matters though. They don't come into play with a DMCA complaint, which is entirely based on copyright law.

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