On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Marcus Cooper wrote:
On 04/10/05, Martin Sommer
wrote: Heise got sued because in the new copyright law of Germany, not only ownership, distribution and usage are forbidden but even also to provide any information about how one can circumvent a copy-protection. And distributing a link is such an information.
Without slagging off anyone's country and their laws (God knows the UK have such a great history on stupid laws) that is a really scary law.
Indeed! It is.
Doesn't that effectively mean that any discussion of reverse enginneering is illegal in Germany. I know that's not what the law is trying to do but it looks like that is a very likely side effect.
I don't know but I guess that compiling any sources into binary code is not "copy protection" in the sense of these laws. Therefore many companies who distribute proprietary software, protect it by putting paragraphs into the the EULAs which forbid explicitely reverse engineering. -- Dr. Martin Sommer Product Manager Consumer Products SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, D-90409 Nürnberg Phone: +49 (0) 911 740 530 Fax: +49 (0) 911 740 53 575 Email: martin.sommer@suse.com ----------------------------------------------------------