Except that a lot of laws were rewritten in the last 30 years.benpatient said:i see no difference between compaq reverse engineering the IBM PC and real reverse engineering Fairplay.
Windowlicker said:haha! how did you come up with that? you made my morning so much brighter![]()
jocknerd said:Lets say I develop a way to flash the firmware in the iPod and make it capable of playing other music formats (i.e. Ogg Vorbis or FLAC). Is this illegal? Probably is in this day and time. Especially when people are being thrown in jail for selling mod chips for Xbox's. But it should be perfectly legal. It is in every other industry. Imagine if companies couldn't make aftermarket parts for automobiles. We have to ask ourselves, what do we want the technology laws to cater to? The tech companies or the users. I prefer that the laws work for the user.
Apple doesn't have any patents on FairPlay. If they had, this would have been a slam dunk case.NeoMayhem said:File formats CAN be patented. That is why there is no legal way to encode things like gifs, mp3's aac's or mpeg2 for free in your apps. You have to license the technology to do it. Apple COULD sure real for this and probably should.
It would, if you want to be perfectly legal.MacCoaster said:Ah. That's quite a set back for an open source project, no?
Code-crackers risk fines and prison time when they defeat copy-protection technology, but such draconian rules likely don't apply in the case of RealNetworks and its iPod "hack," legal experts said.
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Legal experts say there's a big difference between RealNetworks' product and the work of code-crackers who have helped break through DVD copy protection, or who have previously helped strip FairPlay protection from iTunes songs.
Those underground programmers, at least in the United States, risk running into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars "circumvention" of digital copy protection. By contrast, legal experts note that RealNetworks is "hacking" Apple's technology in order to protect music in its own way, not to pirate or otherwise copy it without permission. This kind of reverse engineering for compatibility purposes happens routinely in corporate America, and is allowed as long as competitors aren't actually using copyrighted code, attorneys say.
"What the DMCA was meant to protect wasn't this," said Ken Dort, an intellectual-property attorney with Gordon & Glickson in Chicago. "In fact what (RealNetworks) has done is what people do all the time. They buy the latest, greatest widget of a competitor and take it apart."
dekator said:Sorry, if this has already been said...
I think Apple or their customers should thank Real for what Apple should've done in the first place: Open up the iPod. It will only make it more attractive. Having the iTunes music store as only option is a stopper. Sure, most people will eventually end up there anyway, 'cause it's easily the best solution out there. Also, it would be nice to see more players with AAC capabilities. Staying in a closed system won't work. Apple should know that.
The fact that the DMCA wasn't meant to block this doesn't change the fact that the law still prevents hacking a DRM. It doesn't matter what your intentions are.SandyL said:Hopefully those who have never even read the DMCA and yet claims that it applies to this case will now shut up.
dekator said:Sorry, if this has already been said...
I think Apple or their customers should thank Real for what Apple should've done in the first place: Open up the iPod. It will only make it more attractive. Having the iTunes music store as only option is a stopper. Sure, most people will eventually end up there anyway, 'cause it's easily the best solution out there. Also, it would be nice to see more players with AAC capabilities. Staying in a closed system won't work. Apple should know that.
The DMCA outlaws circumvention. Adding DRM isn't circumvention.shamino said:The fact that the DMCA wasn't meant to block this doesn't change the fact that the law still prevents hacking a DRM. It doesn't matter what your intentions are.
Yes, I have read the DMCA. You obviously have not.BTW, have YOU read the DMCA, or are you just citing newspaper articles as if they are the final arbiter of law?
to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner
It outlaws a lot of things that are only tangentially related to circumvention. The relevant paragraph here is the one on reverse engineering, not circumvention:SandyL said:The DMCA outlaws circumvention. Adding DRM isn't circumvention.
Please note the key phrase "sole purpose". Meaning there are no other legal reasons.REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a 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, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
The program in this case would be iTunes or the software running on the iPod. There aren't any technological measures that control access to iTunes or the iPod software. RealNetworks can't have circumvented technological measures that don't exist. In other words, this does not apply.REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a 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, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
jouster said:How true, as Xerox discovered when Apple copied the GUI from them.