Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] FriBID: Legal issues with reverse engineering

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 08:46:30AM +0100, Alex Fernandez wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Mario Castelán Castro
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > November 11th 2009 for address@hidden subject
> > "FriBID: Legal issues with reverse engineering"
> >
> > The author of that project says: "I've reverse-engineered the
> > interface by studying the data that was sent through it and written a
> > free client (that's FriBID).". I dobut if it is legal to publish the
> > result of that reverse engeeniering. Someone knows about the matter?.
> 
> It basically depends on the intent. As the renowned legal corpus in
> the Wikipedia says:
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality
> So what is the purpose of FriBID?

Cf. http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?9909

It's clearly interoperability, but even if it were not, I think we
should assume reverse-engineering is legal. Some recent laws try to
harm our right to reverse-engineer, but we shouldn't over-fear it, in
practice making those laws more powerful than they actually are.

-- 
Sylvain