Bug#48045: debian-policy: non-US is a misnomer
On Tue, Nov 16, 1999 at 09:49:34AM +0000, Philip Hands wrote:
> > AFAIK there is no "perfect" regime in the world, and the political
> > situation in many countries wrt. crypto (for example) is rather
> > unstable. For example, the LinuxDVD code is probably only illegal in
> > the UK, since the "rip" of the encryption algorithm was only illegal
> > under Britain's copyright law.
>
> IANAL but I'm pretty certain that one is completely within one's rights
> in reverse engineering things in the UK.
You are allowed to reverse engineer something in order to make something
that will work with it; I believe it is not legal to reverse engineer
something in order to compete with it. How this applies when what you
actually reverse engineer is the file format, as here, I don't know, but I
would expect it to be legal.
Reply to: