On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 03:35:11PM +0100, Kai Blin wrote:
No argument on the US part. I'm still convinced that by EU laws, you're allowed to crack an app you bought in order to make it run on your software. As this hasn't been tested in court yet, though, I'll concede.
IANAL, but since 2008 germany adopted a law from a EU proposal (maybe other countries added it before), that disallows circumventing copy protections at all. so in theory your statement is not true any longer for the EU.
Hi! Here, in Czech Republic, there is also a new law forbidding to circumvent the copy protection, it probably comes from the same european source as the German one. However, using cracks to make the app running on wine can't be primarily classified as "circumventing copy protection", but as "modifying an app to run on other OS", which is, I hope, still legal. I think that if I own a legal copy of an application, didn't make any illegal copies of it, and just modified it to run in wine, any court on the world should decide, that my intention was not to circumvent the copy protection (because it is not of any importance to me, I already legally have it), but to make it working (yes, I've spent my money to use the app and I had to modify it to be able to use it). Our courts have to evidence my invention to make a punishable act (like to circumvent the copy protection to either get a pirated copy or to sell my pirated copies to anybody else), but if I did something similar, but for evidently another purpose (to run the legally owned app), I think that it's not a punishable act. Something similar happened recently - a court set free an old woman which was growing marihuana strictly for medical purpose, even if there is a law strictly prohibiting to grow marihuana at all. Of course IANAL, but my kids are running cracked games on wine, however we HAVE all the CDs including bills from the shop for everybody, who would like to accuse us of using illegal software.
With regards, Pavel Troller