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However, there's another decision that doesn't seat with me either. US Copyright lay says: > person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a com

However, there's another decision that doesn't seat with me either. US Copyright lay says: > person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs Courts have generally chosen that a EULA clause can override this provision of the law, which seems pretty backwards to me, especially considering that the validity of shrink-wrap licenses hasn't been established very firmly (although I'm not sure about the nature of the EULA in this case)

kazinator 9y ago
Even so, simply running the program as a blackbox and comparing whether your own program produces the same behavior does not constitute "access to a particular portion of that program for the ... purpose of identifying and analyzing ... elements that are necessary to achieve interoperability". That text is clearly referring to peeking at the code. The external behavior of a program isn't an access-controlled portion of the program. Only the code can be that. Access controls are tricks like basic compilation of source into machine code (and further obfuscation from that departure point such as run-time decryption of code sections, requiring execution to be controlled in a debugger to intercept the decrypted code), and the placement of a program as firmware onto a tamper-resistant chip.