[HN Gopher] EU court rules no EULA can forbid decompilation, if ...
___________________________________________________________________
EU court rules no EULA can forbid decompilation, if you want to fix
a bug
Author : aleclm
Score : 764 points
Date : 2021-10-09 13:12 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (curia.europa.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (curia.europa.eu)
| systemvoltage wrote:
| What about Fonts? Can someone find a "bug" in the font and fix it
| according to their taste?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| An obvious bug would be fonts unsuitable fir visually impaired,
| low contrast, etc
| SSLy wrote:
| Only one way to find out: get sued by a foundry and wait for
| the court's opinion.
| toolslive wrote:
| IANAL but what's the point/use of having a rule (like an EULA
| that forbids decompilation) that cannot be enforced?
| ineedasername wrote:
| Let's say you want to share your fix with people so you write a
| blog post with instructions. Without this ruling, you could be
| sued and forced to take it down.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Like ripping the tag off a mattress?
|
| I think it's probably aimed at a _business_ that claims it can
| fix software bugs by reverse-engineering.
| perl4ever wrote:
| I have never seen a tag on a mattress that forbids the end
| user/consumer from removing it.
|
| Have you?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Old joke.
| perl4ever wrote:
| I never got the memo it was a joke. I thought people just
| can't read.
| nolok wrote:
| Because when you threaten users with it, most of them will
| comply to avoid legal actions, even if they are clearly in the
| right.
|
| 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.
| alerighi wrote:
| What sanctions? I've never seen one even fined for pirating
| software or any other kind of media, let alone someone fined
| for decompiling or altering software in general. Is something
| that everyone does.
|
| 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...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Does Aaron Schwartz count as a counterexample? I realize he
| was never formally convicted but they were in the process
| of throwing the book at him when he died.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > never seen one even fined for pirating software or any
| other kind of media,
|
| It has happened in the US. Se https://www.theguardian.com/t
| echnology/2012/sep/11/minnesota...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Because when you threaten users with it, most of them will
| comply to avoid legal actions, even if they are clearly in
| the right.
|
| > 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.
| pdpi wrote:
| A few reasons.
|
| 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.
| kevingadd wrote:
| You can use it to issue DMCAs and as a basis for lawsuits even
| if you wouldn't actually win - most victims don't have the
| resources to exercise their rights.
| tibbetts wrote:
| "Chilling effect." I see the same thing with unenforceable
| employment contract clauses, where people still avoid violating
| them just to be safe.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Because benefits outweighs risks.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Maybe we need to pool some money for motivating people to
| defy these things in court. Precedent bounties or somesuch,
| to motivate people to call the establishment's bluff.
| all_these_years wrote:
| I am not a legal expert at all, but I guess this blurs a bit more
| the separation between open source and closed source...
|
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I'm really not sure why software is treated differently from eg.
| hardware.
|
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| Problem is that when you buy software you often get more code
| than you paid for, and that code is hidden by a feature flag.
| Reverse engineering the code and fixing that feature flag is
| therefore illegal, because otherwise that business model
| wouldn't work. In practice nobody will sue you as an individual
| for doing that, but lets say that Microsoft does it to avoid
| millions in licensing fees, then you have a reasonable legal
| case against them.
|
| 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?
| gpm wrote:
| It's easy to compile (or transpile in interpreted languages)
| the code needed to implement a feature flag entirely out of
| the binary you distribute to customers who haven't paid for
| it. I don't see that this is a problem.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| jhgb wrote:
| 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.
| kolinko wrote:
| 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.
| kgeist wrote:
| 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."
| detaro wrote:
| if an EU country, obviously, since this court ruling is just
| confirming the 1991 EU copyright directive for a specific case.
| jhgb wrote:
| 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.
| krzyk wrote:
| EU law supersedes local law. So if your country one would
| prohibit such actions, EU law would take precedence and
| allow it.
| djhn wrote:
| In practice the enforcement of laws happens at the
| national level, and EU precedence doesn't always bridge
| the gap between theory and practice.
| jhgb wrote:
| 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.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| hansel_der wrote:
| > 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
| kortilla wrote:
| 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.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| Right; rich people and corporations exploit the law by
| funding lobbying and pacs that write loopholes into
| legislation, instead of the direct corruption you see
| with Eastern oligarchs. It's an important distinction
| yariik wrote:
| 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.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| If the legal system was anything but a farce all EULAs and TOSs
| would be declared invalid, as all parties are aware that they
| aren't being read before being agreed to.
| user5994461 wrote:
| Fact is, they are invalid in many countries.
|
| 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?
| deepsun wrote:
| Meta: .jsf? I thought Java Server Faces died a decade ago.
| b20000 wrote:
| will this allow decompilation of EU politicians so we can fix
| them?
| chris_wot wrote:
| And suddenly it became legal to decompile code to find exploits.
| Awesome!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| One man's exploit is another man's accessibility feature.
|
| Exploits by themselves aren't good or bad - their use for
| malicious purposes is.
|
| See also: adversarial interoperability.
| cute_boi wrote:
| why is this a bad thing? If someone company like
| google/microsoft ships backdoors due to government then
| decompiling and finding bugs will help humanity right?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Do you really believe that anyone who has the intention to find
| exploits cares about whether decompilation is legal or not?
| crest wrote:
| </sarcasm> ?
| orra wrote:
| Reverse engineering for interoperability has been legal in the
| EU since at least the 1991 Software Directive.
|
| 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.
| maxpro wrote:
| As this would stop someone writing exploits from decompiling
| brezelgoring wrote:
| Nothing stopped you from doing it before, only difference is,
| now you can do it openly. Hopefully for good purposes.
| dahart wrote:
| It did not become legal to decompile code to find exploits.
| This EU ruling affirms the legality only in the EU to decompile
| code only for the purpose of fixing bugs.
| orra wrote:
| IMHO this is a sensible decision, one that reflects the clear
| underlying intention of the statute. Article 5(1) of the
| Directive says:
|
| > [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_.
| agilob wrote:
| This is sensible because it's the same as taking laptop apart
| to replace failing RAM or disk.
| phkahler wrote:
| So patching it to work without company servers after they've
| been shut down might be ok too!
| detaro wrote:
| Nice to see the court confirm the law is as broad as it was taken
| to be, and that it can't be worked around with EULA bullshit.
| balozi wrote:
| The EULA is still an agreement. Potential end users have an
| opportunity to not accept the agreement and walk away.
|
| I think this ruling is populist pandering that ends with
| reduced incentive for commercial software. Undermining property
| rights has never resulted in freer societies.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > The EULA is still an agreement.
|
| 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.
| yariik wrote:
| > The EULA is still an agreement.
|
| I can't agree to anything that is impossible for me to
| understand or even to read.
| chuckee wrote:
| While I welcome this decision, it is absurd that the law places
| any limits whatsoever on the act of examining how an artifact you
| legally own functions.
|
| 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.
| burrows wrote:
| > it is absurd that the law places any limits whatsoever on the
| act of examining how an artifact you legally own functions.
|
| 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.
| chuckee wrote:
| > You're just smuggling in your own implicit definition of
| "legally own".
|
| 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.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Next step: extremely large fines for putting such provision on
| EULA.
| balozi wrote:
| Why not just simply decline the EULA?
| alkonaut wrote:
| Wait is decompolation ever forbidden anywhere? Why? I'm not
| reproducing anything until I use anything I learned producing
| something similar, at which point I might be in trouble (at least
| if I publish the reproduction).
|
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| Decomplication isn't forbidden, however a lot of acts related
| to decomplication are forbidden. Similarly you cannot reverse
| engineer a car and use that knowledge to build a replica to
| sell or to mass produce copies for your company to use. The
| special case here is that the information gained from
| decomplication can legally be used to fix bugs.
|
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Similarly you cannot reverse engineer a car and use that
| knowledge to build a replica to sell or to mass produce
| copies for your company to use._
|
| 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.
| alkonaut wrote:
| But either something is patented or otherwise protected, or
| it isn't. You can't sell a car whose secret sauce to high
| margin sales is a fender production method that will be
| obvious to anyone taking it apart and then cry foul when
| someone does take it apart.
|
| > 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I hope somebody in the EU uses this to sell kits that rid Deere &
| co. equipment of its notorious maintainability bugs.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Or cars... Or washing machines... Everything has some form of
| computer in it nowadays...
| everyone wrote:
| I thought EULA's are not really worth anything anyway, cus if a
| case actually comes to court any EULA is usually ignored, cus all
| users ignore them + they often have loads of illegal stuff in
| them.
| swayvil wrote:
| This will definitely encourage the production of bug-free
| commercial software.
| sigmar wrote:
| >the act of correction of its errors, may not be prohibited by
| contract
|
| 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?
| elygre wrote:
| In a court case, you should probably be prepared to argue how
| that is an error, based on the legal mechanism that allows you
| to use Spotify in the first place. Then the court would answer
| your question.
|
| (No, I think you would not get away by that)
| ginko wrote:
| Hopefully
| hyperman1 wrote:
| How does this interact with yesterday's facebook story.
|
| 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28801908
| indemnity wrote:
| When did you acquire or purchase the Facebook app?
| afiori wrote:
| generally by searching Facebook on duckduckgo and following
| links, for some people it might be preinstalled on their
| phones so they literally bought it.
|
| in any case it was given willingly to me by Facebook
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| True enough. I uninstall it from my phone and after every
| update it magically reappears. Ah Facebook, like U2 in
| ITunes, will they never learn.
| kergonath wrote:
| Wait, I thought we were all paying with our data and the
| general state of surveillance on the web.
| speedgoose wrote:
| All the time with my personal data. You don't even need to
| install anything. Many applications and websites will do
| share your data to Facebook. Friends too. It's great.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| IANAL, but FB never made any direct or implied promise in its
| EULA that you could mass unfollow everything, and there
| probably ARE terms against scripting their API in an
| unauthorized way, so I don't think there is a case.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| If Facebook tells me I can only browse their website in
| Google Chrome, then can they sue me if I open Facebook in
| Mozilla Firefox?
| amelius wrote:
| EULA doesn't mean anything as it's a one-sided contract. It
| doesn't allow the user to provide _their_ terms in an input
| field. So it can 't be taken seriously.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Any EULA agreement is between Facebook and the End User not
| the creator of a Chrome plugin.
|
| If they have a case it is against the individuals who _use_
| the plugin.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > FB never made any direct or implied promise in its EULA
| that you could mass unfollow everything
|
| 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.
| rafale wrote:
| It reminds me of the issue of whether game cheats are legal or
| not. Activision is losing a lot of money because cheats are
| ruining the game for everyone. Here, the only "victim" is
| Facebook itself. And it's not cheating as much as automating a
| manual process. My opinion is that Facebook overstepped here. A
| net negative move with all the bad PR they got, of which they
| already have plenty. And the attentionthe plug-in got.
| owisd wrote:
| The author made a post explaining the plugin was almost
| certainly legal, but facebook can exploit the legal system make
| it too expensive to be worth defending.
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Ah yes, "rights", the privileges of the man with enough
| wealth to file suit.
|
| History will not look back well upon this charade.
| philipov wrote:
| "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor
| alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal
| loaves of bread." - Anatole France
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| If only that were the reality if things.
|
| In practice, the rich are not even as forbidden as the
| poor from that.
| kitd wrote:
| And unfortunately, the author comes from the UK which is now
| no longer under the jurisdiction of the CJEU. That might have
| provided him some protection.
| Quarrel wrote:
| In this case, I suspect that wasn't the concern.
|
| 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.
| chippiewill wrote:
| The law in these areas won't have diverged significantly
| yet so he wouldn't have any less protection from the UK
| justice system compared to the EU.
| np_tedious wrote:
| Sounds like two distinctions. Not sure if either is legally
| relevant
|
| 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
| [deleted]
| Decker87 wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be legal?
| oytis wrote:
| Can someone share cases/anecdotes of decompiling software to fix
| a bug? Never done it myself nor heard someone doing that. Unless
| you consider not being able to run a program without license a
| bug :)
| chris_overseas wrote:
| Many years ago I had a after school job working at the local
| newspaper office. They used some very expensive and somewhat
| quirky accounting software. It turned out to have a hard
| coded(!) percentage baked into the binary for the country's
| sales tax rate when issuing invoices.
|
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| A long time ago, I was building a payment integration between
| shopping cart software and a e-check processor. I was testing
| my half-done work, and got an inscrutible error; finding access
| to the server source (because IIS exposed the data fork of the
| VBS) made it a lot quicker to figure out what I did wrong. Not
| exactly the same scenario, but close enough.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| You may enjoy
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/414688/how-can-
| i-r..., in which I figured out what was keeping modern Unity
| games from working on a very outdated operating system, and got
| them to run. I'm really quite proud of the writeup! :)
| niea_11 wrote:
| GTA Online fix to reduce loading times [1]. Rockstar awarded
| the guy 10k$ [2]
|
| 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...
| xojoc wrote:
| And there was some talk about that previously:
|
| 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: http
| s://discussions.xojoc.pw/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnee.lv%2F202...
| ineedasername wrote:
| Could be useful in finding and confirming a bug in the first
| place. If you can decompile the code then you may be able to
| systematically find some types of bugs that would otherwise be
| opaque to easy discovery.
|
| 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.
| foxfluff wrote:
| I've done it with games many times. Well, disassembling rather
| than decompilation, but close enough.
|
| 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.
| yarcob wrote:
| I have decompiled AppKit on macOS occasionally to debug issues
| in my app.
|
| 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).
| nelgaard wrote:
| One of the first times I did it, was 15-20 years ago. I had a
| digital camera, a Canon IXUS S110, and wanted to have some
| pictures printed. There were some sites where you could upload
| pictures, but they all used som proprietary Windows program,
| and I had Linux. Except the supermarket chain Fotex which had a
| website with a Java applet. But it failed when I tried to use
| it throwing an exception about a missing directory.
|
| 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.
| dunham wrote:
| For one of the early iPhone jailbreaks, I made a patch for
| libtiff that fixed the bug that the jailbreak exploited. I
| didn't want to be pwned while browsing the web with my iTouch.
|
| 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.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _I didn 't want to be pwned while browsing the web_
|
| Oh I remember that bug. It was insane that a button on a web
| page could do that.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I did a fair amount in the early 2000s, mostly unmaintained
| software that I wanted to return to life
| [deleted]
| EliRivers wrote:
| http://wonderfulcoding.blogspot.com/2015/10/crack-it-dont-br...
| veidr wrote:
| In the 90s (or maybe 00s) the company I worked for had a self-
| hosted web app (they mostly all were self-hosted, then) that
| did various things, but was also supposed to be able to send
| email via whatever mail server you already had.
|
| 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.
| to11mtm wrote:
| I can't do one for Decompiling, but I reverse engineered a
| Pole-line drafting application in order to write utilities to
| fix the data corruption it sometimes caused.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" Unless you consider not being able to run a program without
| license a bug"_
|
| There are certainly cases where the license server quits
| working, even when the software isn't yet abandonware. I'd
| consider that a bug.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| It wasn't proprietary software, but I used to work with a
| sustaining engineer who ran Firefox in a gdb session. He was a
| "tab hoarder" and this was before the days it would save your
| session; when it reset he complained that he'd lose days of
| context. I watched him hand-repair a SIGSEGV from a null
| pointer dereference. As he was doing so he explained he'd
| reported this particular bug a few weeks ago but "Mozilla's
| triage was taking a while." A few keystrokes later he'd backed
| up a couple of frames, set a condition variable to avoid the
| bad code, and continued the process without interruption.
| Hugely impressive.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| I'm surprised the performance overhead of running a whole web
| browser inside a debugger was remotely tolerable for daily
| use.
|
| 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.
| alerighi wrote:
| If you don't set breakpoints, it's not slower than running
| the software normally.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Impressive indeed, but what is a sustaining engineer?
| ericbarrett wrote:
| An engineer dedicated to bugfixes and crash investigations,
| rather than feature development. Not a common title
| anymore, but you'll still find them attached to products
| that use their own kernel, like switches and network
| storage.
| tibbetts wrote:
| My old Brother printer has an installation utility for OSX that
| doesn't run under modern Java for a trivial reason. I
| recompiled it and swapped in a library to make it work. The
| only point of the tool is to configure the printer (over USB)
| to talk to the right wifi.
| zamalek wrote:
| This becomes incredibly interesting in terms of e.g. Denuvo. This
| anti-piracy middleware has been shown to make games unplayable,
| and this EU law seems to support removing it.
| uncoder0 wrote:
| I can't believe studios let their publishers force this kind of
| tech into their run loops.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Publishers are the ones with the money.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| It's understandable from a publishers perspective.
|
| 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.
| alerighi wrote:
| The people that pirate games are not the one that would
| have bought it day one. It's always the same wrong
| reasoning about piracy, they think that if one person
| pirates the game the same person would have gone and bought
| it. It's not, someone that wants to play the game but not
| pay for it doesn't care about waiting a month (but sometime
| even just a couple of days) to find the crack online.
|
| 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).
| HelloNurse wrote:
| There's simply a gap between the games and media one
| wants to play and the games and media one wants to buy.
| Whatever the reasons are (I'm not sure I'll like it, DRM
| or bugs might make the game unplayable, I'm unwilling to
| pay full price to have a look, I don't want to commit to
| a subscription, I'm an irresponsible freeloader...)
| piracy fills the gap in a way that is impossible with
| material goods, and it will always be so. There's no way
| out, and DRM just erodes goodwill. For example, I stopped
| buying Sony audio CDs, even from artists I like, after
| the rootkit scandal of many years ago.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| It's a little more complicated than this. Sometimes media
| (or games) are easier or a combination of easier &
| cheaper to pirate/workaround drm than obtain legally.
| E.g. Netflix notoriously has location restrictions on
| where their licensing applies, and people use vpns to
| work around these. They literally can't pay Netflix more
| money to e.g. watch the US catalog from Australia. Or see
| also how much game of thrones was pirated, especially
| before hbo had a standalone streaming service. For a
| while you could get it only as a cable add on, so some
| cord cutters turned to piracy.
|
| 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.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > The people that pirate games are not the one that would
| have bought it day one
|
| 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.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Funny how everyone seems to think DRM doesn't work except
| the professionals actually applying it
| RugnirViking wrote:
| In most cases/industries you'd assume the professionals
| would be right, but we're talking about the games
| industry - legendary for its shortsightedness and general
| idiocy - far too many obviously bad ideas get way too
| much money behind them. Very similar to the movie
| industry in that regard
|
| 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
| weirdsquid wrote:
| Yes, but if someone is set on pirating the game, they'll
| just wait until its cracked in a month before playing it.
| So really, publishers aren't going to gain any sales
| compared to not including DRM to begin with. If they do
| it's going to be a tiny, tiny fraction.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Out of curiosity, is there any data to support this
| mindset? It's probably true, but Curiosity(TM).
| zamalek wrote:
| A closely related topic is "the tail of game sales." You
| will probably find game developers talking about it if
| you search for that. Honestly, though, the (frankly
| ridiculous) propensity for pre-order success radically
| upsets this argument.
| pnt12 wrote:
| I don't have sources, but I believe that half the sales
| happen around the first few weeks.
| maushu wrote:
| On the other hand I don't buy games with denuvo so that's a
| lost sale right there.
| emkoemko wrote:
| same, why should i get punished for buying something...
| when pirates get a better product in the end?
| snvzz wrote:
| There's games I want to buy (like tales of berseria), which
| I cannot because they have yet to remove Denuvo, despite
| years.
|
| I might get tired of it and just "pirate" these games.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Ah yes, the publisher's perspective. They can't deal with
| the fact it's the 21st century and copyright makes no
| sense, so they offer an inferior version of the product
| with performance issues, dependency on company servers
| they'll certainly turn off at some point, etc.
|
| Nothing like humiliating your loyal consumers by making
| them pay for a game that's inferior to what pirates get for
| free.
| fsloth wrote:
| Actually copyright and all IP legislation is ever more
| important for businesses as ever more of the wealth
| companies have is in IP. But this is legally delicate
| time, companies don't want to squeeze so hard it raises
| public ire, but sure as anything they don't want to let
| go of a drop of IP 'leverage' they don't have to.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Right. It's all about the companies, isn't it? It's all
| about their leverage, their power, their profits, their
| god given right to eternal rent seeking.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| herio wrote:
| It would be interesting to know how they would classify modern
| "rented" software like the Adobe CS Suite or Office 365. They are
| installed on your machine but works like SaaS.
|
| 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.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| You can still decompile the binaries for Office products today,
| they are desktop products after all. Same for the Adobe CS
| suite, AFAIK.
|
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| Same question goes for an unwanted FinFisher installation on
| your machine. After all, you're somewhat of a licensed user if
| a licensed user installed it lawfully on your machine. And
| since it has bugs in it, it should meet the criteria.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| This sounds incredible, does it allow for redistribution of the
| fixed product? Or is it just for the purposes of notifying the
| creator of the problem and its solution in one go?
| moreira wrote:
| I can't tell, but it'd never be allowed. Grab an AAA game, fix
| a bug in it, and now you're free to redistribute the game
| without consequences. That'd be insane.
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| Yeah a patch should be fine though
| brezelgoring wrote:
| My idea wasn't to redistribute the whole thing, but to
| distribute a patch that other owners of the game can use by
| themselves? Now that's a win.
|
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| Seems like you can distribute it. But you can't create a
| competing product based on it. See point b here, that should
| let you send patches.
|
| > 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.
| pja wrote:
| I doubt you can redistribute the fixed product, that would
| definitely be a copyright infringement.
|
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| This is actually legal under US copyright law. There was a
| case involving the Game Genie which Nintendo sued to stop
| distribution of, in which it was ruled that modifying a
| program for personal use was fair use. If your EULA forbids
| you from decompiling, that's still binding because the EULA
| is the only thing that authorizes you to use the software to
| begin with.
|
| 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.
| tremon wrote:
| _because the EULA is the only thing that authorizes you to
| use the software to begin with_
|
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| Under US law, EULAs are binding per _Vernor v. Autodesk_.
| This does not apply to the EU which may forbid certain
| restrictions in EULAs.
|
| 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.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| >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.
|
| That sounds ludicrous, I can't believe it. Is there a
| precedent of this argument being used in court that you
| know of?
| anonymousab wrote:
| IIRC it has come up in various Blizzard lawsuits around
| bots and cheat software.
|
| 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. SS 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.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "in exchange for not being sued for copyright
| infringement for copying the software from disk into RAM"
|
| 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
| jhgb wrote:
| "the EULA is the only thing that authorizes you to use the
| software to begin with"
|
| Can you override a law with a EULA?
| bitwize wrote:
| No, but you can get people to waive some of their rights
| under law, in exchange for not being held liable under
| other laws, which is how EULAs work.
| jhgb wrote:
| It's difficult for me to imagine how this would work in
| my country's case. As a user of a product, you can't just
| say that the law doesn't apply to you even if the vendor
| wants you to say that.
|
| > in exchange for not being held liable under other laws
|
| And what other laws would apply here?
| kortilla wrote:
| This is pretty standard for trespassing. It's illegal to
| be on someone's private property if they don't want you
| there. "Wanting you there" can very much be conditional
| on other agreements.
| lovemenot wrote:
| >> This is actually legal under copyright law.
|
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| Sorry, I did leave out the US when I typed it. An
| innocent typo.
| lovemenot wrote:
| Thanks for understanding
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| > the EULA is the only thing that authorizes you to use the
| software //
|
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Galoob v. Nintendo is so narrow in scope that it probably
| doesn't even cover games made today. Hell, people trying to
| resell Duke Nukem mods tried to rely on it and the courts
| said no.
|
| 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.
| FastEatSlow wrote:
| Is there any difference legally between the user applying the
| patch file themselves and them being provided a script to
| automatically patch it for them?
| chillfox wrote:
| I would argue that the user running a script to apply the
| patch is them applying it themselves.
|
| I believe the important part here is that the patch does
| not include the copyrighted software, only the
| modifications.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I can't see a difference between these two things. I would
| think the `patch` command and a (bash?) "script" are
| legally equivalent.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Well, so far it's how Fan Translations of videogames have
| largely avoided legal scrutiny: they distribute the
| translation as a ROM patch, but it's up to the end-user to
| track down the actual ROM / game dump.
| PeterisP wrote:
| That seems shady from a legal perspective - unlike a
| patch, a translation is obviously a derived work (being
| one of the explicitly listed examples in law of what is
| defined as a derived work), and you need permission from
| the author to distribute or even make a translation.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It's probably not legal but it's in the "no one really
| cares territory" since to actually enjoy the translation,
| you need to either buy a copy of the game or pirate it.
| In the former case, great, a sale made to a person that
| would've never otherwise bought the game and in the
| latter it makes no real difference since you were never
| marketing to that person anyways.
|
| 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.
| MayeulC wrote:
| It looks like you can fix it yourself, or ask someone, as long
| as you have a legal copy.
|
| 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _I wonder if that would help the open source GTA remake
| case._
|
| 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.
| orra wrote:
| > does it allow for redistribution of the fixed product?
|
| 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.
| aleclm wrote:
| AFAIU the second part of the ruling states that you don't need
| to warn/get permission by the author. Basically, you can fix it
| for your own consumption.
|
| Surely you can't redistribute copyrighted material.
| dathinab wrote:
| Yes, through you might(?) distribute a tool to help people
| "fix" their thing themself.
|
| 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.
| aleclm wrote:
| Usually, to patch a program, a binary patch is enough.
| Decompiling and recompiling is hard (even that's what we do
| at rev.ng!) :)
| est31 wrote:
| No, this doesn't neccessarily imply that. The copyright owner
| possesses multiple rights and some of those rights only apply
| to distribution of altered works while still allowing
| alterations. E.g. you buy a house from an architect. Can the
| architect sue you if you add another door?
|
| 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.
| sumedh wrote:
| > you buy a house from an architect. Can the architect sue
| you if you add another door?
|
| You are the owner of the house not the architect why would
| the architect sue you?
| gambiting wrote:
| Well, here in UK it's common when buying a house from a
| developer that the house comes with a covenant of some kind
| that stipulates that you can't make modifications to the
| front of the house without obtaining permission from the
| developer first. Yes, even though the house is entirely
| yours. The given reason being that they don't want you
| making the house "ugly" and ruining their reputation as a
| house builder.
| johnisgood wrote:
| That is such bullshit. It is not their house! Does it
| actually ruin their reputation? Or would it if people
| knew people could do anything to their own damn house?
| Still, I find not being able to do such things to my
| house without their permission silly. What is the most
| minor modification that is disallowed?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Well, the same argument applies to software, I already
| bought a copy videogame, so why should I be prevented
| from altering in any way I want?
|
| There has been a huge corporate landgrab in software
| under the guise of cipyright
| psmears wrote:
| In my experience the point of such covenants is not about
| the reputation of the builder, it's about preserving the
| character of the neigbourhood... it can be inconvenient
| for you, yes, but your house is more valuable if you know
| your neighbours aren't going to ruin your view by turning
| the front of their house hideous...
| [deleted]
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking of this and I thought this was
| mainly the reason but then they should start being honest
| about it, IMO. I wonder what modifications this disallows
| that do not actually do any "reputation ruining".
| zeeZ wrote:
| From skimming it, a legal purchaser can decompile it only to
| the extent necessary to fix errors affecting operation, and
| copyright remains with the original rights holder. It's very
| limited.
| mrtksn wrote:
| You probably can buy, fix and re-sell software. I recall about
| some EU court ruling that made it clear that you can definitely
| sell the software you bought.
| gambiting wrote:
| It's been ruled this way over and over and over again - you
| can definitely resell OEM software no matter what the licence
| says, it's your right as a consumer in the EU. My company
| bought a 50-user MSSQL 2019 licence for cheap(like EUR1000)
| because a company was going into bankruptcy and software was
| being sold off separately to all hardware.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I dislike this ruling, because:
|
| 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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| So you admit that the problem is the law, but you dislike the
| fact that the judges correctly interpreted it.
|
| 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.
| seoaeu wrote:
| You were hoping that the court would find the very concept of
| copyright to be invalid?
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