4 ms·
There's no warranty so abiding by the EULA is meaningless. That's only there so Microsoft covers their ass because lawyers exist and they justify their salary b
by vasco 4y ago
There's no warranty so abiding by the EULA is meaningless. That's only there so Microsoft covers their ass because lawyers exist and they justify their salary by doing things that "reduce the probability of Microsoft getting sued". You can reverse engineer the binary all you want.
- numpad0 4y agoCopyrights can be enforced even for free products or for meritless motivations. Some thinks it only applies to paid IP or limited distributions but technically there’s no such requirement.
- parineum 4y agoWhat would enforcement look like in the case where someone reverse engineered the binary?
- pygy_ 4y agoI suppose they'd get their user license perpetually revoked and wouldn't be allowed to use VSCode legally. Good luck enforcing that. This is, if the EULA has legs. MS could have put that language to scare people off event though it doesn't have legal footing.
- dx034 4y agoProbably not allowing them to publish that information? However, if you can state general facts from how telemetry works without going into detail on how you got that information, I doubt they'll be able to convince a court that you did anything illegal. In the end, you can just monitor network traffic and verify telemetry is switched off that way.
- parineum 4y ago> Probably not allowing them to publish that information? That definitely falls under free speech in the United States. Look at DeCSS[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
- EMIRELADERO 4y agoCopyright omly regulates copying and redistribution, not use. So the act of reverse engineering itself is not illegal under copyright. There might be concerns with contract law however, although many arguments such as unconscionability could be used against it.
- lozenge 4y agoDo you want to bet your company's financial health on that legal analysis? If not then it doesn't really matter.
- eterevsky 4y agoHow is abiding by the EULA tied to warranty? It's tied to your using the product.
- vasco 4y agoImagine your tv says in the EULA you can't open it. The only way the TV company knows this and you can get any consequence out of doing it is if you want to activate warranty. In any other scenario they have no clue. You can apply the same thing here. There's no way for Microsoft to know if you reverse engineer a binary in your machine to learn about it, and since you're never gonna send them the binary for repairs, you're good to go.
- eterevsky 4y agoIf nobody finds out about an illegal thing that you did, it doesn't immediately become legal. Imagine you send a GDPR wipeout request to a company. You have no way to check whether they really delete all your data, but I hope you agree that it would be illegal for them to not do it.