buglebum said:
That isn't true in the slightest, what makes you think that? The end user downloads the original Sony firmware, the hacker provides the tools to modify that firmware. The hacker provides no copyrighted code. Even the decryption key that geohot provided isn't copyrighted, since it can be derived by reversing without knowledge of trade secrets. It's questionable if a decryption key can even be copyrighted in the first place from my understanding but I can't be sure of that. Would be curious to know if anyone knows better. |
Actually the law around reverse engineering are quite complex.
I know about them because I deal with them on a professional level.
I'm not sure about hardware but on the software level for example it's quite complex.
Lets say you want to make an application that reads excel files. It is not legal to purchase a copy of excel and use it to reverse engineer how excel saves its files...
What you can do it get public available excel files and try to understand what those files contain. But at a business level it is illegal if the developer doing the reverse engineering has access to the application he is targeting.
What most companies do to get around this is they subcontract that work and the contractor asks for the original company to create a bunch of excel files with specifics characteristics and then to provide those to him ( and that is legal).
I'm not aware of any company every trying to apply those rules to non company entities, but they are there........
I guess following those rules you could argue those hackers ran the original Sony software to see how it works so that they could change it's behavior through a mod, and technically that's a grey area ( but like I said I'm not aware of anyone ever suing anyone except a business over something like this..)