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Comment by justin101 | Hacker News Reader

I am curious about the legality of this. I guess I assumed that doing this type of thing would technically a DCMA type breech? So this makes me wonder if my assumption wrong? How does this work legally?

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It's typically against terms of service to decompile or reverse engineer applications you download in this way, but it's also typically against terms of service to use their services from unofficial clients, so I think they're already way past T&Cs.

RE for interoperability is allowed in many jurisdictions (afaik, ianal)

What does copyright have to do with this?

I think the implication is that bypassing cert pinning could be considered a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA and WIPO Copyright Treaty, because it results in decryption of copyrighted content without the permission of the copyright owner.

IANAL, but in the US, at least, I think the exemptions for good-faith security research[1] would apply. Maybe even the reverse-engineering for interoperability language in the DMCA itself[2].

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/10/28/2015-27...

[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-105publ304/pdf/PLAW...

I'm not an expert, but I think in the Blizzard v Glider case the courts decided that if you've violated a program's EULA it becomes illegal copyright infringement to duplicate the bits from your disk into RAM

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