EU court rules no EULA can forbid decompilation, if you want to fix a bug
curia.europa.eu
curia.europa.eu
> [certain acts] shall not require authorization by the rightholder where they are necessary for the use of the computer program by the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose, including for error correction.
Essentially, they have ruled that other Articles in the Directive do not supersede this Article, and that reverse engineering to correct an error can be necessary.
This court, the CJEU, has good form on sensible decisions regarding computing. For example, SAS vs World Programming (C‑406/10) allowed reverse engineering for interoperability. That case, also, was the court upholding the clear intention of the statute. Moreover there was UsedSoft vs Oracle (C-128/11), allowing the resale of software licences, including the right to download the software where necessary, upon purchasing a second hand licence.
There's also the CJEU case of Ninetendo v PC Box & 9 Net (C-355/12), which sets out circumstances where it's lawful to sell a device which circumvents DRM.
Alas in that case, the bar is set too high: it's not enough for there to be legitimate reasons to break the DRM; that has to be weighed against the 'rights' of copyright holders.
I was just focusing on the law because copyright expansionists have a lot of institutional capture, or at least the ear of legislators. So even though the intention of the Directive was clear, I wouldn't have been entirely shocked if the court had decided against decompilation being allowed for fixing bugs.
Am I allowed to modify my washing machine, if i want to eg. use it for sous-vide? Sure. I might lose my warranty, I might not be able to resell it as a washing machine without disclosing the not-up-to-electrical-code work, but I'm pretty sure the manufacturer can not sue me for modifying it and/or posting an instructional video of how to do it.
Buying software and treating it as a "borrowing" is something that has to be stopped.
Yeah. Their marketing is all lies too. They show people a "buy" button, obviously leading them to believe they'll own what they pay for. Then they bury people in these insane license agreements nobody even reads much less understands. In these agreements they explain that no, you're not actually buying anything from us, we're just doing you the favor of allowing you to use the product provided you follow these rules, and we reserve the right to take the product away for any reason including no reason, and in that case we'll still keep your money.
Seriously, why is this allowed? In a just world, courts would simply invalidate these contracts in their entirety. It's simply not possible to believe that a normal person consented to anything written in there. The vast majority of people don't even read this stuff. They're trying to buy something but the company keeps showing them these licensing terms they know nothing about so they click next to get rid of it. That's what it means when the company says someone has "agreed to their terms". They annoyed them so much with popups they just clicked accept to make it all stop. They just wanted to buy the product.
Why are normal people even being exposed to the complexities of copyright law and licensing to begin with? This should not be allowed. Nobody should have to care about this insanity. They should just own the stuff they bought, just like they own physical items. People understand buying and ownership. It should be literally illegal for companies to confuse laymen with these legal buzzwords. If they're dealing with other companies, it's fine since it's safe to assume they know better. Consumers on the other hand absolutely deserve protection.
As I understand it, the EU essentially does this, deeming EULA terms to be unenforceable if they are unreasonable and/or hidden.
I'm no lawyer though, and unfortunately I couldn't find a great article on the topic, just scattered HackerNews and reddit discussions.
If software companies want to pretend that I agreed to licensing agreements, they can change their advertisements to "Rent our software for $60!".
Most of them seem unwilling to do that, so I will continue being unwilling to adhere to any of their fine print.
If what you say would be completely legal then many big companies would absolutely start doing that. Do you think that would be a good thing?
If they sold a feature, it's yours.
If I buy a car containing eg. heated seats, but the feature is disabled, because I didnt select the proper addon package, who is going to sue me, if I add a switch, and connect the heating elements to 12V supply myself? Or buy an addon controller? Or even buy addon seat heaters?
Which is a great argument for Right to Repair, but makes everything a hassle on the consumer side - any future interaction with the company around the vehicle is a landmmine waiting to be triggered.
Facebook has a buggy UI that makes it hard to unfollow everything. Some dev created a plugin to fix this. Facebook banned him and lawyered up.
Is the plugin legal in europe or not? Is fixing a dark pattern a bugfix?
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
The UK currently replicates almost all the same provisions as the EU (because, it was part of the EU, and in leaving it was easier to just say, yes, we're keeping the rules the same).
It will inevitably diverge from the EU rules, but most of these are identical for now.
The case in the OP was against the Belgian Government, who do have the resources to fight silly lawsuits. Random individuals in most jurisdictions can't really entertain such things over something that doesn't make them any money against a trillion $ company.
History will not look back well upon this charade.
In practice, the rich are not even as forbidden as the poor from that.
1) browser extension (which I guess is kind of a client side JS modification?) vs decompilation 2) bug vs feature addition
My uninformed take is that Facebook's claim is weak to begin with, but that this judgment doesn't really influence anything
Why does this have to be explicitly allowed? Everything not prohibited is permitted.
> there probably ARE terms against scripting their API in an unauthorized way
The extension is not bound by any terms. It's the user's choice whether to violate these conditions by installing and using it.
In any case, users should have every right to do this. It's essentialy self-defense against corporate abuse. They can get us addicted to content feeds so we spend hours looking at ads but we can't script their site? That's abuse and we have every right to defend ourselves. These stupid terms are like a drug dealer that makes us promise not to go to a doctor and seek help for addiction before giving us our free sample.
If they have a case it is against the individuals who use the plugin.
It's basically 10,000 employee company against single consumer. No judge would think that is a fair way to go about these things.
in any case it was given willingly to me by Facebook
Even if it only lasts a month before being cracked, it allows the publisher to capture that first month of sales without competition from TPB. That first month is typically the most important time in a game sales lifecycle.
Counter to that, it should be a policy to remove Denuvo 90days post launch, as it does, in fact, cause performance issues and such.
Nothing like humiliating your loyal consumers by making them pay for a game that's inferior to what pirates get for free.
They forget that copyright is part of a social contract. In its original form, it was something like this:
> we'll pretend your work is scarce so that you can make money
> after a while, it will enter the public domain
Copyright only works because we allow it. We're all pretending this stuff can't be copied and distributed infinitely and at zero cost. We're the ones doing them a favor. We were duped. They assured us that eventually the works would become public property. All of it will one day belong to all of us. That was a lie.
Of course they don't want to let go of their imaginary property. They want their copyrights to last forever so they can extract their rent out of their state granted monopoly for all eternity. So they lobby the governments and systematically rob us of our public domain rights.
So I will no longer pretend this stuff is scarce. It's not. It's data, nothing but a huge number stored on a hard disk. Not a single person on this earth owns that number. It's trivial to copy and distribute it. Everyone needs to know this truth. We need technology that makes it painfully obvious and easy for everyone. Technology that proves it by subverting the business models of these rent seekers. Services like Sci-Hub.
The whole notion of companies hoarding intellectual property is absurd. Intellectual property was never meant to give leverage to companies, it was meant to give them an incentive to create new products and works. Intellectual property expires. At least it would expire if the system worked properly instead of being co-opted by corporations with deep pockets and lots of lobbyists.
If these companies are hoarding wealth in the form of IP, the only just outcome is the one where they lose it all.
>> we'll pretend your work is scarce so that you can make money
>> after a while, it will enter the public domain
That is not even close to the original form of copyright. In its original form, copyright was a monopoly held by the crown (and granted to printers) for the purpose of censoring works the crown didn't want published.
DRM was proved to not work, and only impact on people that buy the media with restrictions such as reduced performance, making the game size bigger, requiring an internet connection even for playing offline, having to activate again the game when they change hardware or reinstall the operating system, have even DRM that are basically malware and reduce the stability of the whole operating system and reduce its performance by installing some low level components that are active even when you are not playing the game, and so on.
In my opinion if games are all DRM-free people would still buy them, game studios would still make money, and users will be more happy (and possibly buy more games).
There is also a nonzero number of people who would buy a game if piracy was not an option, or if there was significant enough friction in pirating it.
Denuvo and other DRM of varying levels do work in their intended function, for some period of time. Sometimes it's cracked before release, and sometimes it takes a while, depending on interest in the game, the current status of cracking groups and all sorts of other things.
So the calculation is pretty simple: Will the sales gained from the few pirates who would buy if they can't pirate, be higher than the sales lost due to the impact of a bad DRM implementation and/or the "stink" of it?
Publishers think that's a gamble worth taking every time, because 1) they assume their devs will get the DRM implementation right, or right enough 2) gamers don't really vote with their wallets, and/or the ~15% performance loss of a bad DRM implementation doesn't really eschew or discourage the supermajority of buyers. The market simply doesn't care.
There's also the PR and sales bump from the later "Denuvo has been removed!" patch (and it gets the game back in the news, after all) but I'm going to assume that it's negligible for this discussion.
And oh look at the one other industry still shooting itself in the foot with regards to piracy. Streaming is changing that for movies - you can see why so many are going for games streaming style services - just nobody has figured out the model
When content is available easily and at a reasonable cost, it's often a better experience to buy than pirate. Sure, there are some people who will still pirate everything but there's a lot in the middle who are willing to pay something.
Choices of entertainment to pay for diverge from choices of entertainment to consume, and piracy accommodates the difference.
I might get tired of it and just "pirate" these games.
And this is how it should be everywhere, the copyright model was beneficial for the society maybe up until 300 years ago. Today, the whole copyright thing is bizarre.
The copyright model is more recent than 300 years ago. It cannot have provided any benefit to any party before then.
show one legislation where this is not true
Corruption is not yet prevalent enough that a rich person can get away with murder by bribing judges/prosecutors to interpret the laws differently.
"steal a million dollars and you go to jail, steal a billion dollars and they name a business shool after you"
"A person who lawfully owns a copy of a computer program or database has the right <...> to carry out any actions related to the operation of a computer program or database in accordance with its purpose, including <...> correcting obvious errors."
As far as I understand, this is a ruling about Council Directive 91/250/EEC. A directive is like a template from the EU that gets copied into local laws. So there is no distinction between local an EU law here.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-making-process/types-eu-la...
What they like to call "reverse engineering", because describing in plain language what is being forbidden would reveal what a severe limit on personal rights this is. Especially as we are being surrounded by devices where "reverse engineering" is the only way to determine what they do.
Such laws are no less than restrictions on what we are allowed to discover about our environment.
You’re just smuggling in your own implicit definition of “legally own”.
As you’ve pointed out, “ownership” is a legal construct. One that can feature any number of limitations or clauses through the execution of a contract.
I suppose before trade secret laws were effectively expanded to items in our own homes, the commonly accepted definition of "own a thing" was "you are allowed use of the thing, but not to examine how the thing works"?
It's not I who is doing the smuggling, and there's a reason the law uses obfuscatory language.
It's kind of a gray area for me at least, does it mean you own a copy or not? I'm sure it doesn't but I also know that legal system do not generally deal in shades, they are binary, either a or b.
If it legally means that you own a copy, this would in theory allow you to patch the online checking out of it to keep it running.
What you can't do is decompile the server-side stuff. In case that stopped working somehow, you could find a way to remove the dependency on online stuffs from your desktop product, it's been done before, often in cracks.
If they fully move to web based SaaS and abandon desktop implementations completely, then yes, you'd be right, you'd no longer be able to modify it in any way.
I think this ruling is populist pandering that ends with reduced incentive for commercial software. Undermining property rights has never resulted in freer societies.
Agreements can't violate the law. They most certainly cannot deny people their rights.
> Potential end users have an opportunity to not accept the agreement and walk away.
No, they can and should be able to use the software regardless of any abusive clauses included in the contract. Companies should be punished for even thinking they could get away with confusing laymen with their illegal conditions.
People have the right to reverse engineer. Companies are just gonna have to deal with it. It doesn't matter if they lose money.
> Undermining property rights has never resulted in freer societies.
Real property rights, yeah. Intellectual property is not real property. It barely makes sense in the 21st century.
I can't agree to anything that is impossible for me to understand or even to read.
But forbidding decompilation? That’s like forbidding someone to buy a car to take it apart and learn exactly how it was put together - which is what every manufacturer does with competitors’ cars.
So basically the law is there to protect small shops from having their product stolen or their licence agreement circumvented by big companies. Otherwise a big company could just buy a single licence of your software, reverse engineer it, change it so that they get features for free they otherwise would have to pay for etc.
Yes, actually you can... that's why the whole aftermarket exists. AFAIK it is trademark law that prevents you from selling a true replica, but otherwise how do you think all those compatible parts --- in fact many of them better than OEM --- were created?
You can build an entire small-block Chevy and not use any parts manufactured by GM, for example. The same goes for the rest of the vehicle. Even replacement body panels are available.
The main difference is that software has zero cost to copy, whereas trying to create an entire car from 100% aftermarket parts would cost many times more than the real thing.
> buy a single licence of your software, reverse engineer it, change it so that they get features for free they otherwise would have to pay for etc.
That seems like standard licensing? The forbidden part about unlicensed use of software is using it.
1: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
2: https://www.pcgamer.com/rockstar-thanks-gta-online-player-wh...
On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 (703 comments)
On Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/jzj4q9 (25 comments)
And Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/luq9oz (1022 comments)
P.S. these threads where found with a site I'm building: https://discussions.xojoc.pw/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnee.lv%2F202...
I gave the patch to someone named "pumpkin" on IRC, and it got integrated into the jailbreak. Kinda fun to be part of that, even though I only contributed a few bytes of code. (And I got to learn a little arm assembly.)
It's been a long time, but the tricky part was trying to shoehorn a if / return in there. I remember having to rewrite some existing code in a more efficient way (might have been jump table -> conditionals) to gain an extra couple of bytes.
I've also reversed java class files a few times to patch issues for work, but those usually have source these days. The one I remember, years ago, was a bug in the ftp code that could cause hangs with some servers. Something about sockets being closed in the wrong order.
The rest of my decompiling/disassembly has been for interoperability, trying to figure out stuff like the Notes.app or Numbers.app file formats.
Oh I remember that bug. It was insane that a button on a web page could do that.
Wouldn’t it have been easier (and way more performant) to just whip up a quick extension that dumps the list of open tabs to disk every time a tab is opened/closed? I recall session savers being some of the very first extensions available for Firefox.
For example, in one case I discovered that double clicking a cell sometimes only selected part of the contents. With Hopper I was able to verify that the bug is that AppKit just selected the range from 0 to 32000, assuming that would be enough. I was able to work around the issue by manually selecting a bigger range. (I also reported the bug to Apple, they told me they won't fix it because it's a deprecated API. Doesn't matter that 100s of apps, including Apple's own, were still using it...)
In another case, I found out that an obscure feature (text attachments with custom cells) was crashing because AppKit called -release too often, so it was impossible to use the feature. Apple had apparently broken it when implementing the force touch functionality for dictionary lookups.
Another time Cornerstone, the SVN client, was broken on a prerelease version of macOS. I don't recall the details, I think they called -registerDefaults: too early. I was able to fix it by writing a dynamic library that changed the -registerDefaults: implementation so that it ignored the first call (today with hardened runtime this fix wouldn't be possible anymore without disabling system integrity protection).
So I downloaded the JAR file, decompiled it with the JAD decompiler and found that they had hardcoded the file separator as backslash. So that was easy to fix. I compiled it, ran the JAR file and uploaded my pictures and picked up the prints a few days later.
Of course the government eventually decided to change that rate, and it sounded like the vendor wasn't going to be able to get them upgraded to a corrected version in time. I overheard the discussion and offered to try and help by seeing if I could hack in a fix. Rather surprisingly they agreed, and after a bit of debugging I found the problem and patched the binary. It did the trick and they successfully used that patched version for a couple of weeks until they got their upgrade.
But it didn't work for us. I forget the exact reason, but it was like some kind of text encoding issue where the mail server was expecting ASCII but the software was sending some weird non-ASCII character from EUC or SJIS that borked it. (It was a Japanese workflow app for internal company processes like calendaring, expense approvals, etc., so it had lots of user-entered strings that were in Japanese. UTF-8 existed, but... this product had legacy issues.)
Unfortunately the vendor delivered that software (in part, but the significant part for this story) as compiled Perl modules. I think they maybe did that to make it harder for third parties to customize their shit, and therefore make it easier to get any related customization/integration contracts, but possibly it was just innocent performance enhancement.
Regardless, though, a dude I worked with decompiled those modules and figured out how to fix the bug by doing some kind of text/encoding transform.
And then it could send email.
There are certainly cases where the license server quits working, even when the software isn't yet abandonware. I'd consider that a bug.
For example, changing hardcoded key bindings to be more dvorak friendly in Touhou games.
I've fixed many Quake engine based games that have the infamous OpenGL extension string overflow bug.
There's another old game (possibly Soldier of Fortune 2: Double Helix?) that refuses to run if you have the string "generic" in your OpenGL driver name. This is common on Linux distros that ship a "generic" kernel.
Painkiller crashes if your uptime is too high, due to overflow on division. That's another easy fix.
Personally, I did it once on a very old game with DRM that no longer functioned, though the game ran fine. I wasn't about to trust a random crack download, so I decompiled and removed the DRM check.
Then add cases where "are clearly in the right" is a lot murkier to decide, and they will comply even more. Hell, the company itself might have had their lawyers figure out the user is in the right but the cost of proving it would be so high they won't succeed.
Then add cases gravitating around massive sanctions if you're wrong, like copyright infringement.
No every day individual is risking insane sanctions if they're wrong, even if they're 99. 9% sure they're right, and the eula allows the company to manipulate them without even committing to a legal action.
> Then add cases where "are clearly in the right" is a lot murkier to decide, and they will comply even more.
And this is why courts should be inherently biased against the corporation. They simply have more power than individuals and without checks and handicaps they will abuse the justice system in order to essentially bully people into compliance.
In my country, the laws and courts recognize the power differential between consumers and corporations. It's a simple concept but it essentially means corporations must prove their innocence when challenged in court. It's great, especially since everyone has access to legal counsel. Anyone who feels their rights have been violated can hold the companies accountable for it and it's up to them to produce documents and other evidence showing they followed all consumer protection laws.
The only thing that can get you into trouble is if you that kind of things for a profit, and that is right, but if you do that for personal use or to share it on the internet without profiting for it, nobody will ever do you anything...
It has happened in the US. Se https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota...
One, you can have one blanket EULA for all markets, with a clause saying “except where it contradicts local law” or some such. More specifically, it’s often the case that the clause is too broad, but significant portions of it might still be applicable. In this case: you’re not allowed to decompile code as a blanket rule. The clause as a whole is still valid and applies to all other circumstances even if it can’t forbid this particular case.
Two, it might be an honest mistake (probably not the case in this particular instance, but definitely a possibility)
Three, you might cynically leave it there to discourage the behaviour. Readers might either not know the clause is unenforceable or be scared away by the possibility of costly litigation that would bankrupt them even if they’re in the right.
I think it's probably aimed at a business that claims it can fix software bugs by reverse-engineering.
Have you?
But I don’t see why you couldn’t distribute a patch file, which people could apply to their own (legitimately acquired) copy of the original binary.
The problems creep in where if you, say, decompile Windows to fix bugs in it, and then go to work on the Linux kernel (or other core system component). You are now tainted and probably shouldn't work on code similar to Windows because you can't prove that you didn't copy Windows code from your head into the new code.
Do you have a source for this claim? I'd say that the primacy of having (legitimate) access to the software trumps any EULA provision concerning its use. The logical consequence of your assertion would be that software without an EULA can never legally be used.
Generally US law gives primacy to contractual agreements, and the EULA is a contract in which you give up some of your rights in exchange for not being sued for copyright infringement for copying the software from disk into RAM. This is copying under copyright law and the 1976 Copyright Act does not protect copies made for personal use.
Note that this does not apply to open source software; OSS licenses are bare licenses under common law and do not have the force of contract.
Proprietary software without an EULA cannot legally be used except by the copyright owner. That's why EULAs exist.
That sounds ludicrous, I can't believe it. Is there a precedent of this argument being used in court that you know of?
From MDY Industries v. Blizzard:
> As with most software, the client software of WoW is copied during the program's operation from the computer's hard drive to the computer's random access memory (RAM). Citing the prior Ninth Circuit case of MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc., 991 F.2d 511, 518-19 (9th Cir. 1993), the district court held that RAM copying constituted "copying" under 17 U.S.C. § 106.[4]
That one is more about another program accessing the ram and reading it (the act itself meaning that data in memory is "copied" again) but it's not a big jump to apply the same logic to a regular player's usage of the game.
I am not a lawyer, but this sounds very wrong. If you buy a book or a painting, and take a photo with it , you have not violated copyright
I’m afraid the argument that copyright is infringed when a copy is made within computer memory has long standing in the courts & is well established at this point in time (to my lay legal understanding).
Presumably you meant under US copyright law. This based on my observation that only people referencing that particular jurisdiction would write as though there were only one. It's particularly galling in comments on an article about EU laws.
Can you override a law with a EULA?
> in exchange for not being held liable under other laws
And what other laws would apply here?
Nowadays the business model for most games is not to sell the game, but to sell unlock keys or other subscription items that could be trivially unlocked with a cheat device. Furthermore, just using that cheat device almost certainly requires defeating a DMCA 1201 technical protection measure. So my gut feeling is that it's probably already been overturned simply by shifting business practices and changes to the law.
"Tainting" isn't necessarily how the law works, either. The standard for copyright infringement in the US is access plus substantial similarity. If you have access, then you need to make sure any code you write is different enough (as determined by a jury) from what you've seen. Merely having seen NT kernel code doesn't mean you legally can't write any kernel code at all - you don't have to prove a negative of "well I didn't remember X". The court (and jury) is going to look at what you wrote and what Microsoft alleges you copied, and then try to determine if it's actually a copy or not.
Piffle. The seller had an offer of sale, so I purchased the product outright - easy to tell as otherwise it would have been a lease or limited license agreement rather than a sale - I purchase it and have rights to use it (as I see fit) as long as they don't infringe the law.
Sure, they can choose to make a further contract, and I can sign that and return it if I wish to be bound by it.
Companies need to be brought to heel. I don't know why we play along with their nonsense.
This doesn't make sense to me. If I "decompile" my Toyota, should I never work on cars because I now know what Toyota did to make mine? Of course not. That's absurd. I'm not sure how it being Software changes that.
I believe the important part here is that the patch does not include the copyrighted software, only the modifications.
The English release of Steins;Gate is actually an edited version of the fan translation, so the property owners couldn't have been that upset with the fan translators.
When you buy some media from the copyright owner, you can distribute it freely. This is called first sale doctrine in the USA, and is also present in certain forms in EU copyright law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
The first sale doctrine is not present for digital goods though, at least in the USA. In the EU, there has been a court case in 2012 UsedSoft GmbH v. Oracle International Corp which established something like that for digital goods too. But I'm not an expert on this.
You are the owner of the house not the architect why would the architect sue you?
There has been a huge corporate landgrab in software under the guise of cipyright
> 2. The provisions of paragraph 1 shall not permit the information obtained through its application:
> (a) to be used for goals other than to achieve the interoperability of the independently created computer program;
> (b) to be given to others, except when necessary for the interoperability of the independently created computer program;
> (c) to be used for the development, production or marketing of a computer program substantially similar in its expression, or for any other act which infringes copyright.
Edit: The point of the ruling was that this clause can be interpreted to work for fixing bugs and not just interoperate with other programs. So everything here goes for fixing bugs as well.
I also love the idea of adding newer OS compatibility to old software, seeing old video games running on Windows 10 would be thrilling. Perhaps do the same for drivers of old hardware? Also a win, IMO.
Another big question, in these patches, can I do only the fixes I can justify? Or can I go wild and remove the parts I don't like? I'd love to remove telemetry from my TV and all those weird apps it comes with that are in Chinese and are unusable outside China.
Surely you can't redistribute copyrighted material.
Like bundling a open source decompiler, recompiler, code to work around decompilation restrictions and a patch into a single binary you can then use to fix the actual binary.
I think (IANAL) redistributing is okay as log as it requires a lawfully acquired copy of the program.
I wonder if that would help the open source GTA remake case. They can argue it now runs on ARM for instance, which would be okay given the text.
Doubt it because they were distributing the entire decompiled codebase. The part that was missing was just the game assets.
If they were just distributing a binary patch that fixed the game, then they would probably be safe.
Nah, that would almost certainly infringe upon the exclusive [power] of the copyright holder to distribute the original product.
But I presume this may allow you to redistribute a minimal binary patch, or allow you to describe how to make the modifications manually.
But I have a special place in my heart for someone who would use the law to ensure that less food is available.
1. The copyright holder can include a dummy clause in the contract that prohibits decompilation, except if there is a written permission from the copyright holder, or in cases where existing local laws permit it. This is sufficient to turn down the part of the law that applies only where there is no such clause.
2. The copyright holder can always claim that decompilation is never necessary for the user to have the errors in the program corrected, or to achieve interoperability. "Indeed, all the user had to do is to pay $1000000000 for UltraPremium support".
P.S. I am not a lawyer.
So if there is a bug, you can fix it yourself, whether or not the provisioning company has a(n) (un)paid plan for you that fixes it. This makes sense - otherwise you could once in a while let a bug "slip" to production intentionally and then ransom your users for more payment.
The relevant part of the law:
> Whereas this means that the acts of loading and running necessary for the use of a copy of a program which has been lawfully acquired, and the act of correction of its errors, may not be prohibited by contract; whereas, in the absence of specific contractual provisions, including when a copy of the program has been sold, any other act necessary for the use of the copy of a program may be performed in accordance with its intended purpose by a lawful acquirer of that copy;
One major rationale is that the EULA/ToS is only visible after purchasing the product, which makes it void automatically. How could the customer agree to something they are not aware of and cannot read?
what is considered an "error" here? If I think Spotify made an "error" by calling up ads on their free tier, am I still following their ToS if I decompile and patch the app to remove ad code?
(No, I think you would not get away by that)
Yes, there's a requirement for interoperability, but "interoperability" is construed broadly. Interoperability in law relates to "interfaces", including APIs, and compatible file formats. Conceivably the term could also be used to describe an antivirus program which protects the program in question.
That's good this is allowed. Besides, bad faith actors will reverse engineer for malicious purposes, regardless of the law.
Exploits by themselves aren't good or bad - their use for malicious purposes is.
See also: adversarial interoperability.
It looks like the only remaining issue is the licensing model, which would need to consider the legislation on where the software is acquired or executed.
EULAs will probably be rewritten, lawyers will profit.
1. It affirms the legal right of people or abstract entities to prevent you from copying information - that is, to have the state punish you for copying information from one page to another or from one file to another. This is immoral, anti-social.
2. It affirms the legal right to prevent you from creating modified, adapted, combined or partial versions of a piece of software or text, when you have a copy of the entire original.
3. It only allows decompilation by someone who has paid for the right to hold a copy of a program, and then only for the purpose of getting the program to work properly.
Now, you could say "but that's EU law" - and while that's true, but it doesn't make it any better. People should face no negative consequences for making copies of things, whether exact or modified.
If you want judges to be able to rewrite laws to your liking, you should be aware that other people with worse views on copyright might also want judges doing that.