EU court rules no EULA can forbid decompilation, if you want to fix a bug

https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=247056&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=6413406

by aleclm • 5 years ago

938 224 5 years ago

curia.europa.eu

brezelgoring5• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Yeah a patch should be fine though

brezelgoring5• 5 years ago

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.

Jensson3• 5 years ago

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.

pja2• 5 years ago

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.

FastEatSlow• 5 years ago

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?

bitwize4• 5 years ago

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.

MayeulC• 5 years ago

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.

Hamuko2• 5 years ago

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.

orra5• 5 years ago

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.

aleclm2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

est31• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

zeeZ• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

gambiting2• 5 years ago

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 €1000) because a company was going into bankruptcy and software was being sold off separately to all hardware.

chris_wot6• 5 years ago

And suddenly it became legal to decompile code to find exploits. Awesome!

cute_boi• 5 years ago

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?

chris_wot6• 5 years ago

I didn't say it was. I am genuinely happy that it is now legal.

adrian_b• 5 years ago

Do you really believe that anyone who has the intention to find exploits cares about whether decompilation is legal or not?

chris_wot6• 5 years ago

No, not really. I like that it is legal to do so now.

crest• 5 years ago

</sarcasm> ?

chris_wot6• 5 years ago

No, I was actually happy about this.

orra5• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

As this would stop someone writing exploits from decompiling

dahart• 5 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

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.

chris_wot6• 5 years ago

Indeed, we are not disagreeing. I'm very happy that it is now legal. That's what I wrote, I think people have read into my comment that I'm being sarcastic, where I'm not.

brezelgoring5• 5 years ago

Nothing stopped you from doing it before, only difference is, now you can do it openly. Hopefully for good purposes.

chris_wot6• 5 years ago

Indeed, I quite agree.

_kbh_• 5 years ago

this has always been legal in a lot of countries.

orra5• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

This is sensible because it's the same as taking laptop apart to replace failing RAM or disk.

orra5• 5 years ago

Absolutely agreed, morally it's the right decision.

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.

phkahler• 5 years ago

So patching it to work without company servers after they've been shut down might be ok too!

orra5• 5 years ago

You'd hope so.

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.

detaro2• 5 years ago

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.

balozi2• 5 years ago

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.

matheusmoreira6• 5 years ago

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.

yariik2• 5 years ago

The EULA is still an agreement.

I can't agree to anything that is impossible for me to understand or even to read.

no_time2• 5 years ago

This is the exact opposite of undermining property rights. You sold a thing to me. Your control over that thing ends when I hand over the money. I may be forbidden from patching in a new logo and reselling it, but you that's about all you can expect me NOT to do with it.

oytis• 5 years ago

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 :)

niea_11• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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: https://discussions.xojoc.pw/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnee.lv%2F202...

yarcob• 5 years ago

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).

bravetraveler• 5 years ago

I did a fair amount in the early 2000s, mostly unmaintained software that I wanted to return to life

EliRivers• 5 years ago

http://wonderfulcoding.blogspot.com/2015/10/crack-it-dont-br...

veidr• 5 years ago

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.

ericbarrett2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

e3bc54b2• 5 years ago

Impressive indeed, but what is a sustaining engineer?

chris_overseas• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

nelgaard• 5 years ago

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 Føtex 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• 5 years ago

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.

ineedasername3• 5 years ago

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.

to11mtm• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

"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.

tibbetts2• 5 years ago

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.

Wowfunhappy• 5 years ago

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! :)

ineedasername3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

sellyme2• 5 years ago

This is common in achievement-hunting communities - when a game is uploaded with bugs that prevent achievements from being possible and the developer/publisher can't be bothered to actually fix it, community members will decompile the game, write a patch for the bug, and then forward it to the developer so that it can actually get resolved.

no_time2• 5 years ago

I bought a super cheap Goke SoC based security camera unware that it does not function without big brother connections to some chinese ip. A bit of looking around late it turns out someone cracked the password of the telnet server and some guy on a russian forum (4pda.ru i think) has already made a patched binary that works fully offline. I ran radiff2 on it and it was quite a few modifications to make it work. Without knowing much about ARM, would've taken me ages to figure out.

einpoklum• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

You were hoping that the court would find the very concept of copyright to be invalid?

all_these_years• 5 years ago

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.

b20000• 5 years ago

will this allow decompilation of EU politicians so we can fix them?

sigmar• 5 years ago

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?

ginko• 5 years ago

Hopefully

elygre• 5 years ago

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)

sigzero• 5 years ago

No, that would not work.

toolslive• 5 years ago

IANAL but what's the point/use of having a rule (like an EULA that forbids decompilation) that cannot be enforced?

nolok• 5 years ago

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.

alerighi3• 5 years ago

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...

matheusmoreira6• 5 years ago

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.

tibbetts2• 5 years ago

“Chilling effect.” I see the same thing with unenforceable employment contract clauses, where people still avoid violating them just to be safe.

ineedasername3• 5 years ago

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.

AlbertCory3• 5 years ago

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.

perl4ever2• 5 years ago

I have never seen a tag on a mattress that forbids the end user/consumer from removing it.

Have you?

pdpi• 5 years ago

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.

numpad0• 5 years ago

Because benefits outweighs risks.

__MatrixMan__4• 5 years ago

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.

kevingadd• 5 years ago

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.

jhgb6• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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."

detaro2• 5 years ago

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

jhgb6• 5 years ago

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.

grishka• 5 years ago

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_der2• 5 years ago

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

yariik2• 5 years ago

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.

thriftwy• 5 years ago

Next step: extremely large fines for putting such provision on EULA.

balozi2• 5 years ago

Why not just simply decline the EULA?

zamalek2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I can't believe studios let their publishers force this kind of tech into their run loops.

bigbillheck• 5 years ago

Publishers are the ones with the money.

InvaderFizz• 5 years ago

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.

__MatrixMan__4• 5 years ago

I hope somebody in the EU uses this to sell kits that rid Deere & co. equipment of its notorious maintainability bugs.

wiz21c• 5 years ago

Or cars... Or washing machines... Everything has some form of computer in it nowadays...

__MatrixMan__4• 5 years ago

Oh yeah, absolutely.

But I have a special place in my heart for someone who would use the law to ensure that less food is available.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

What about Fonts? Can someone find a "bug" in the font and fix it according to their taste?

SSLy• 5 years ago

Only one way to find out: get sued by a foundry and wait for the court's opinion.

ClumsyPilot3• 5 years ago

An obvious bug would be fonts unsuitable fir visually impaired, low contrast, etc

deepsun• 5 years ago

Meta: .jsf? I thought Java Server Faces died a decade ago.

everyone• 5 years ago

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.

hyperman1• 5 years ago

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

rafale• 5 years ago

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.

np_tedious• 5 years ago

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

Decker87• 5 years ago

Why wouldn't it be legal?

indemnity• 5 years ago

When did you acquire or purchase the Facebook app?

speedgoose• 5 years ago

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.

afiori• 5 years ago

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

kergonath• 5 years ago

Wait, I thought we were all paying with our data and the general state of surveillance on the web.

lr4444lr• 5 years ago

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.

kwhitefoot2• 5 years ago

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.

matheusmoreira6• 5 years ago

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.

TechBro8615• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

It's basically 10,000 employee company against single consumer. No judge would think that is a fair way to go about these things.

owisd• 5 years ago

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...

Blikkentrekker2• 5 years ago

Ah yes, “rights”, the privileges of the man with enough wealth to file suit.

History will not look back well upon this charade.

kitd• 5 years ago

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.

cyborgx7• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

chuckee2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

chuckee2• 5 years ago

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.

herio• 5 years ago

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.

brezelgoring5• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

analog31• 5 years ago

I'm thinking of an analogy: Renting a house. If the house needs repair, I'd probably give the landlord a fair chance to fix it, but would also feel entitled to fix it myself if the problem interfered with the functioning of the house.

alkonaut2• 5 years ago

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.

Jensson3• 5 years ago

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.

alkonaut2• 5 years ago

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.

userbinator• 5 years ago

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.

ajsnigrutin2• 5 years ago

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.

Jensson3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

ajsnigrutin2• 5 years ago

So what?

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?

spaetzleesser• 5 years ago

That's certainly the companies' problem. If they don't want code to end up at the customer they can easily remove it from compilation. Not doing that is just laziness.

matheusmoreira6• 5 years ago

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.

MaxBarraclough• 5 years ago

In a just world, courts would simply invalidate these contracts in their entirety.

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.

sellyme2• 5 years ago

I could not agree more with this.

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.

hda2• 5 years ago

Blame Bill Gates. He's largely responsible for changing people's perception of software from it being seen as math to some sort of "property".

thaumasiotes3• 5 years ago

What did he do?

EamonnMR2• 5 years ago

The buying is being replaced by renting so it probably will stop.

xet7• 5 years ago

There are complaints about renting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28831551

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353718

swayvil• 5 years ago

This will definitely encourage the production of bug-free commercial software.

solarkraft• 5 years ago

Well, cool. It’s nice that it’s allowed now. Now please make it feasible or, better yet, unnecessary.

wly_cdgr• 5 years ago

People are definitely gonna use this ruling to justify reverse engineering games to modify the game design, claiming that the balancing/mechanics are "buggy". Some of that will be in earnest, some of it will be cover for pirates. The stuff that will be in earnest will make for some interesting arguments about who really owns a game design once it's out in the world, and what constitutes a bug vs a design choice/flaw

patrakov• 5 years ago

I don't see how the ruling helps.

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.

EEBio• 5 years ago

You can correct any errors regardless of any contractual provisions. In the absence of contractual provisions, you can perform additional changes to the software.

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;

EU court rules no EULA can forbid decompilation, if you want to fix a bug

Related Stories