[ILUG] (somewhat OT, perhaps) sklyarov et. al.

[John Kelly]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 04:58:30PM +0100, Ronan Waide wrote:
> I was reading through some assorted Sklyarov-related stuff this
> morning, and out of curiousity did a search on http://www.gov.ie/ for
> copyright legislature. And lo and behold, the Copyrights Act, 2000,
> has a section that is remarkably familiar: it allows for the
> prosecution of people who circumvent copyright-protection
> devices. Now, (a) IANAL and (b) I've only read a "Department of Trade,
> Enterprise and whatever else they look after" summary document rather
> than the Act itself, so, you know, it may not be quite as restrictive
> as its American counterpart (which, IIRC, specifically excludes fair
> use from the above clause, i.e. fair-use exemptions do not apply if
> you break copyright-protection). Still, it's a little depressing to
> see that we're in the same legislative mindset as the people who
> arrested Dimitri.

Again.. I'm not a Lawyer but I had a quick breeze through the "Copyright and 
Related Acts 2000" document available from...
http://www.gov.ie/bills28/bills/1999/1899/default.htm

Under "Section 82: Exceptions to infringement of copyright in computer
programs", it states

(2) It is not an infringement of the copyright in a computer program
for a lawful user of a copy of the computer program to observe,
study or test the functioning of the program in order to determine
the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the program,
where he or she does so while performing any of the acts of loading,
displaying, running, transmitting or storing the program which he or
she is authorised to do.

I guess this basically says reverse-engineering is okay, doesn't it?

- John

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