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Australia Make Software Reverse Engineering Legal 86

Posted by Roblimo from the too-bad-all-governments-don't-do-this dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "The Australian government passed legislation yesterday guaranteeing the right to reverse engineer software for the purposes of diagnosing and fixing problems and for interoperability." Looks like WINE and other Windows emulation projects ought to be headquarted in Australia, doesn't it?
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Australia Make Software Reverse Engineering Legal More

Australia Make Software Reverse Engineering Legal

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  • Wine Is Not an Emulator, damnit!
  • Our new law makes it illegal to "communicate the information" to anyone else. Couldn't you reverse engineer it in Australia, put the source on a shell box, give someone else in the US the password, and then, under their Constitutional rights, they could publish a book with the source code ? Because, theoretically, giving someone a shell password isn't really communicating the information ... like giving someone a key to the house isn't transferring ownership of everything in it ? Maybe someone could do what that PGP guy did and publish a book of the WinNT4/98/2k source ?
    =) d
  • Well this step is not original. As far as I know several countries possess such legislation. Russia has done this step some years ago. Both russian and australian laws look similar in the sense on how and when reverse engineering can or should be applied.

    In fact looking at both laws the logic of them is quite clear. Why I shouldn't reverse engineer a product if I need to adapt it to some specific needs? Specially when almost everything needs a small touch of the "magic wand"??

    For many people reverse engineering may look as something extraordinary. However many don't understand that a lot of "features" and "bugs" can be circunvented by this processes. For several years I've been working around I had several times to reverse engineer a lot of stuff. It's true that the advent of Internet made this need not so critical. One can wait for the next patch, bug-feature or hope that the developer hears you.

    However this was at the beginning. Reverse-engineering has seen some new revivals in the open source era. Most of it because original developers cannot hold up their buildups anymore. It is humanly impossible for many to proceed a wide and stable path of development for their products. And while, at the beginning, Internet almost helped to kill reverse-engineering, now it is delivering its detractors to extinction.

    Frankly it is time for US to THINK seriously about reverse engineering. In a good frame of Law this thing is deeply fundamental for the future of the industry.
  • None of that royal crap for us! :)

    Unless you count the Kennedys. :-P

  • Not always. Normally I have all right to abandon my rights. By the Danish laws there are only a few rights I can't abandon by a contract
    Oops, I allready wrote that.
  • It's not so much that some Australians are
    descended from criminals that worries me. It's
    more that some must be descended from prison
    wardens.. (sorry, old Joke - I love Australia
    really.)
  • You still need to source code for bug fixing. Replicating source code by way of reverse engineering is EXTREME tedium.

    Some things you can reverse engineer with relative ease, like API's, resource DLL's, file formats, etc. But generating human-readable source code from a non-trivial application isn't worth the effort it takes.
  • > Apologies for taking this thread further off track.

    It's off to Australia with you for that, matie!

  • WINE isn't / doesn't have to be a replacement for Windows -- it might just be a way to make quick and dirty ports to Linux -- not to replace Windows, but to increase the value of the program by making it avalible for more users.

  • Yay! (Score:1)

    by C. ( 20089 )
    At least, that compensates a bit for the free speech issue...
  • Overseas developers have been able to do this (reverse engineer) for some time, particularly in Europe and the United States of America where Australia's main competitors in this sector are located.

    Is this right? Am I allowed to "reverse engineer", say, MS Excel's COM .idl (or .tlb) file to produce a product that works with it?

    OK, bad example. Could I do this on a library that has an unpublished API?

    Confused I am...


  • Initially I read that as Australia had criminalised reverse engineering and took the rest of the posting as sarcasm. Still can't believe legislators would actually do something sensible.

    Aah now I understand looks like this is already legal everywhere else (the article mentions this being legal already in Europe and USA) and concerns about fixing Y2K bugs bought the stupidity of criminalizing reverse engineering into light, bit late now though!
  • And a bad One for Linux and other Free Software.

    The biggest argument in favour of Free Software is IMO that it gives you the user the ability and the right to fix bugs. With this ruling Australians will have the ability to do so without the source code, so at least in Australia the argument saying You need the source code to debu is no more valid. It will be replaced by : it you'lld be easier if it was open sourced because we you'lld have the source code.

  • This may be a stupid question, but it won't be my first nor my last: If I am in a US state where it is made illegal to reverse engineer, but remotely used hardware in Australia for exactly that purpose, do I go to the big house and lose my life savings? How about if I write and store all of my notes on the Australia box?

    Is telneting into the Australian box commuting to work? If so, how can I be breaking the law? Does our location decide the laws that we live in or the location of our work?

    If our location decides the laws, then since I worked at home, I want the taxes back that I paid to the town my company was located in.

    Happy Friday the 13th!

  • But the "cannot be used or communicated to others for any other purpose" clause would probably be used in cases where something like WINE is being developed to *replace* the product being reverse engineered.
  • ok .. this sounds great ... but ...

    does this mean that if I ( living in sunny South Africa where we are not allowed to do this.) have a shell account ona Box in .au ... and I reverse there then move the source to my local box ... will that be legal ..

    coz then somebody in .au just need to setup a nice shell box and we can all referse there and publish everwhere !!! :P

    bain
  • I think I read somewhere about the government /encouraging/ reverse engineering... lemme see...
    .
    .

  • oops s/brought/bought.
  • IIRC there is a part of the European copyright code that says essentially the same thing as this Australian law: you can decompile or otherwise reverse engineer software in order to develop a compatible product.

    I don't know if there is any case law about this yet.
  • Ahhh ... but it WINE a replacement for windows ...
    it's not ..

    Wine is an implimentation of the windows API under Linux. therefor Wine is not a replacement for Windows .. .linux is the replacement .. wine just goves you windows fumcionality under linux :)

    bain
  • and i guess you are a typical sloppy speller!
    America Sucks, but until you buy my ticket out of here, i am stuck. Happy friday the 13th, i think ill rent a good slasher movie tonight! :P

  • The Idea has Merit, at least under US law, based on the assumption that cracking, say a US government box IN the US is considered breaking and entering, and foreigners can be prosecuted on this. It would be a legal nightmare for any lawyer or Judge though, so I would say go ahead.
  • And if you're working on an encryption protocol on your remote shell, and probably using ssh to do it... Man, that'd get messy :)
    And what if you were using a shell on CyberYugo's server? you know, that thing that is its own country after they get 5 million ppl or something?
  • What about if you live near an international airport (or the Australian consulate)? Take your laptop to the airport, borrow a boarding pass to get into the "international" section, and go to work. Maybe there's a duty-free Starbucks where you can do your work...

    Or go on one of those off-shore gambling cruises. If you write code in international waters, it's probably ok. Just make sure you post it to the 'net from there so you aren't carrying the stuff with you through customs.

    I believe John von Neumann used to take long round-trip train rides just to get work done without getting interrupted, so it's maybe not so far fetched...

  • The free speech thing can still work against this. Consider. I can currently take a proprietary product to Australia, reverse engineer it, and publish an interface description which people can re-implement to.

    So, all a company needs to do is embed obscenities and hidden pornography in their application, and then it's illegal to download it in Australia in any case. Worse still, put obscenities in the fuc^Hnction names, so publishing the resulting interface description becomes illegal under Australian net censorship laws :-)

  • Rhode Island was one of the states founded as a Penal Colony.. IIRC, Roger Williams, state founder, was exiled from Mass. for some crime or another. My history really isn't what it should be.
  • Sounds like Copenhagen airport lounges may become a convenient place to run one's decompilers. I hope they have ample AC outlets :-)
  • > --> Does this mean you are NOT allowed to
    > disassemble something when a minimum
    > level of documentation has been reached. Does
    > that documentation have to be correct
    > and how could you prove it if you can't
    > disassemble.

    You'd code to the published interface and see if it works. Whether or not you could disassemble if it didn't work, I don't know. It seems to me that you ought to be able to on the grounds that there must be some part of the interface for which information is not readily available.

  • Two interesting Paragraphs... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    More freedom for developers (especially those in the open source community) is a Good Thing(TM), but the report does have two interesting paragraphs...

    1). Decompilation of a program will be allowed without the copyright owner's permission for interoperability or security testing only if the information on the program's interfaces or on ensuring system security is not readily available.

    --> Does this mean you are NOT allowed to disassemble something when a minimum level of documentation has been reached. Does that documentation have to be correct and how could you prove it if you can't disassemble.

    2). Information derived from decompilation of a program about its interfaces with other software or about errors in a defective copy, including Y2K problems, or which is required for testing system security cannot be used or communicated to others for any other purpose, without the copyright ner's permission.

    --> Once you have found out the 'useful' information you can not publish it without permission, does this also apply to source code based on it (which in effect discribes it totally)?

    There is still a little further to go...

    mungewell

  • I don't think a shell account in .au would make it legal for you to reverse engineer in South Africa, unless you write a program that does the reverse engineering for you and let it run in Australia. If you don't write such a program, you'd still do the reverse engineering in South Africa where /dev/brain is located, you just use the Australian account as a medium to store your results.

    However, I think that this _is_ great news for open source software. I don't agree with the thought that it will make open source less important because you're allowed to make compatible products without it. I think it might even have the opposite effect: proprietary software becomes less and less useful because one of its main 'benefits', preventing others to make compatible products without your conscent, is no longer there.

    I'm not convinced this will actually have a major impact on anything, but it definitely creates opportunities.
  • From the text, the bill "will allow software engineers to decompile computer software in limited circumstances so they can develop interoperable products."

    It sounds to me like an Australian division of, say, Corel or StarDivision or Applix, could decompile MS Office to improve the reliability of their document import/export functions. The ability to share documents is an old, established interoperability mechanism, and Office itself contains foreign format import/export for interoperability reasons.

    Could this be the practical end of proprietary document formats? I doubt it, but I sure hope so.
  • Read the comments on UCITA and you might draw the
    opposite conclusion. Forbidding reverse engineering could turn out in favour of monopolies and propiarty software houses. Take for instance a small thing like "gnokii" which has been written by reverse engineering calls to and from win software. It would be impossible to publish such code under UCITA, which explicitely forbids reverse engineering.

    way_out
  • Why aren't the icons on the top of my page changing to match the stories.. 3 stories have gone up in the last half hour and the icons havn't changed. Not to mention the 5 minutes it takes to submit a comment.
  • There is a tax home (defined by the IRS and state law)
    There is a legal residence (in the US this is a combo of US and state laws)
    There is an effective location (defined by both for sales and property tax and breaking laws)

    These don't have to be the same place (or even only one place)... And usually, it's not to your
    advantage... They've got you coming and going...
  • Samba [anu.edu.au]

    Chuck
  • Why aren't the icons on the top of my page changing to match the stories.. 3 stories have gone up in the last half hour and the icons havn't changed.
  • > Initially I read that as Australia had criminalised reverse engineering....

    So did I, but I caught it earlier. Is Slashdot learning how to use subliminal messages?
    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."
  • I think the point was that it's not a very funny joke to an Australian to say "You're descended from criminals!".

    Much like you might anger some americans if you say "You're descended from puritan weenies who weren't welcome in Europe!"
  • If you RE MS-Word's file format, you can't put it into Open Source because you can't control the purpose your publication will be put to.

    Why bother reverse engineering it, since it's published on http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?

    (ok ok you were probably just picking an example, but i've heard a lot of people complain about how microsoft is very closed about the binary file formats for office, when they've been releasing all the gory details for years :-)
  • wouldnt it be considered interoperability? cuz you're not replacing the OS, just making linux able to run the apps
  • > Is this right? Am I allowed to "reverse
    > engineer", say, MS Excel's COM .idl (or .tlb)
    > file to produce a product that works with it?

    So far I know the situation in germany and its the same in most parts of the eu:

    Without permission you may not disassemble internal parts and you may not patch disassembled parts, even if you are doing necessary bugfixes.

    But you have rights when buying a product and even more when renting a product (thats one reason no company rents their programs in europe). So you have the right to get a bugfixed version or get you money back within six months, from 2002 on twentyfour months. Thats not just some offer from a company, thats the law.

    But you may watch the communications with the outside. And basicly every API falls under this point.
  • Of course, if the reverse-engineering is done in Australia (or for that matter in a State that neglects to follow UCITA on reverse-engineering) and the specs are posted to the Net, it becomes a First Amendment issue instead of contract law.

    How sad.

    Also, as a practical matter, it might be difficult to sue hundreds of anonymous contributors who just might have done the RE work even if they are in UCITA states, especially if the gatekeeper is in Australia (etc). Australian courts might be a tad reluctant to issue subpoenas against Australian citizens who don't want to cooperate with a US civil action over activities explicitly legal in Australia, and US courts don't have jurisdiction.

    Dang! Try harder next time, Bill.

  • In Denmark the rigth to do reverse enginering is one of the rights you can't abandon. It sounds silly but that kinds of rights exists a few places in the danish copyright laws.

    Microsoft knows it and I think they dropped the "no right to reverse engineering"-clause in the danish version of theres EULA.

    For those interested danis speaking people, it LBK nr 706 af 29/09/1998 37, find it at www.retsinfo.dk [retsinfo.dk] (I hate that site, but don't know any better resource of danish law)

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