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Comment by jhgb | Hacker News Reader

Already enshrined in my country's copyright act: decompilation for purposes of interoperability, bug-fixing, or education is exempted from copyright protection, and I don't see how a legal provision could be overridden by a contract.

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It's definitely legal in Russia to decompile something for the purpose of interoperability. Though you do have to remember that this is Russia, and the interpretation of laws changes depending on who and how rich you are.

> this is Russia, and the interpretation of laws changes depending on who and how rich you are.

show one legislation where this is not true

Lots of western countries, including the US. The way rich people end up exploiting the legal system in the US is not a different interpretation of the laws.

Corruption is not yet prevalent enough that a rich person can get away with murder by bribing judges/prosecutors to interpret the laws differently.

i kind of get what you want to say and admire your trust in humanity, but on the other hand am certain that there have been cases of murder that were "bribed away" in any country.

"steal a million dollars and you go to jail, steal a billion dollars and they name a business shool after you"

Nobody ever in Russia gets prosecuted for doing anything to any software for their own personal use. And actually there's been very few cases when someone was prosecuted let's say for using pirated software for their business. A couple of guys got unlucky and that's basically it.

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 was beneficial for the society maybe up until 300 years ago.

The copyright model is more recent than 300 years ago. It cannot have provided any benefit to any party before then.

Ditto in Poland. Also, it’s legal to use decompilation or even cracks to make and use backup copies of the software you purchased legally.

Here in Russia there's federal law (since 1992):

"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."

if an EU country, obviously, since this court ruling is just confirming the 1991 EU copyright directive for a specific case.

Yes, an EU country, but as far as I can tell, we've already had these provisions since before our accession to the EU in the 2000s.

EU law supersedes local law. So if your country one would prohibit such actions, EU law would take precedence and allow it.

I may be wrong but I was under the impression that local law would have to be harmonized to comply with it in this case anyway. So at that point you have no contradiction of the two. That the local law would diverge instead sounds highly hypothetical.

In practice the enforcement of laws happens at the national level, and EU precedence doesn't always bridge the gap between theory and practice.

"EU law" can refer to several different things.

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...

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