From: R. Dylan Stewart (rxs015500_at_utdallas.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 11:16:09 PST
Well, legally, this would let us decrypt a rip of the Newton's ROM so that
we could run it on an emulator. Nothing more. We could host it, but it
would only be legal to download it if you already had a Newton with that
particular ROM revision. This does not allow for reverse engineering
(either hardware or software). The decision only affects the legality of
circumventing access controls. You have to be able to legally access the
protected work in the first place for these alterations to matter at all.
Of course, the Newton's ROM isn't encrypted in the first place, so that's a
moot point.
As an example of something affected by #2, if my hypothetical 3DS Max dongle
breaks (apparently, a fairly common occurrence), then I can now legally use
a crack to make it dongleless. It is NOT legal to download a copy of 3DS
Max and use the crack to allow it to run on your computer.
As an example of #3, if I own an old Atari game that used some sort of
encryption to prevent copying, then I can now decrypt a rip of it and run
the decrypted file on an emulator. This is legal because the hardware
needed to run the game is obviously obsolete (it is neither currently
manufactured, nor readily available).
Ripping is legal under normal copyright law and the circumvention portions
of the DMCA only come into effect if the thing that you are trying to
overcome is INTENDED to prevent access to the work under certain
circumstances. If access control is incidental (for instance, the fact that
Atari cartridges don't connect to most computers is incidental, not a means
of preventing copying), then bypassing that does not trigger the
circumvention laws. Encryption such as CSS (Content Scramble Scheme; used
on DVDs) is intended to prevent copying. Under these new provisions,
cracking CSS would be legal if all DVD players were to suddenly disappear.
Really, there aren't many works that are affected at all by that revision.
It could be argued that compiling the source code of a program has the dual
purpose of making it useable and preventing others from using your code, but
that is a fairly flimsy argument. As I said above, since it has a dual
purpose, it would be much harder to justify calling it an "access control".
As you can see, this new ruling has very little bearing on the Newton
community.
Now, reverse engineering (real reverse engineering, not decompiling) is
protected under various free trade laws, so according to some
interpretations, it is perfectly legal for us to reverse engineer the
Newton's operating system. Of course, there are other interpretations that
say otherwise, so if you're going to do something like that, tread
carefully.
Reverse engineering as I used it above is a process by which you take a
"black box" and determine how it works by looking only at its response to
input. There are many ways to do this. One popular method used by the
government is setting up two teams. The first team looks at the decompiled
code from the "black box" and writes a specification (plain English, no
code) based on that code. That specifications is then given to the second
team which writes code to fit it. The program was decompiled, but there
were no lines of code that went directly into the final product, so there is
no direct relationship between the two pieces of code.
It may be possible for the Newton community to use a similar process to
write a new Newton, but I still think that it would be best to just write
something to make other devices act more Newton-like.
Wow, that was long! Back to lurking.
Dylan Stewart AC5ZH
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