EU court rules no EULA can forbid decompilation, if you want to fix a bug

IMHO this is a sensible decision, one that reflects the clear underlying intention of the statute. Article 5(1) of the Directive says:<p>&gt; [certain acts] shall not require authorization by the rightholder where they are necessary for the use of the computer program by the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose, including for error correction.<p>Essentially, they have ruled that other Articles in the Directive do not supersede this Article, and that reverse engineering to correct an error can be necessary.<p>This court, the CJEU, has good form on sensible decisions regarding computing. For example, SAS vs World Programming (C‑406&#x2F;10) allowed reverse engineering for interoperability. That case, also, was the court upholding the clear intention of the statute. Moreover there was UsedSoft vs Oracle (C-128&#x2F;11), allowing the resale of software licences, <i>including the right to download the software where necessary, upon purchasing a second hand licence</i>.

I&#x27;m really not sure why software is treated differently from eg. hardware.<p>Am I allowed to modify my washing machine, if i want to eg. use it for sous-vide? Sure. I might lose my warranty, I might not be able to resell it as a washing machine without disclosing the not-up-to-electrical-code work, but I&#x27;m pretty sure the manufacturer can not sue me for modifying it and&#x2F;or posting an instructional video of how to do it.<p>Buying software and treating it as a &quot;borrowing&quot; is something that has to be stopped.

How does this interact with yesterday&#x27;s facebook story.<p>Facebook has a buggy UI that makes it hard to unfollow everything. Some dev created a plugin to fix this. Facebook banned him and lawyered up.<p>Is the plugin legal in europe or not? Is fixing a dark pattern a bugfix?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28801908" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28801908</a>

This becomes incredibly interesting in terms of e.g. Denuvo. This anti-piracy middleware has been shown to make games unplayable, and this EU law seems to support removing it.

Already enshrined in my country&#x27;s copyright act: decompilation for purposes of interoperability, bug-fixing, or education is exempted from copyright protection, and I don&#x27;t see how a legal provision could be overridden by a contract.

While I welcome this decision, it is absurd that the law places any limits whatsoever on the act of examining how an artifact you legally own functions.<p>What they like to call &quot;reverse engineering&quot;, because describing in plain language what is being forbidden would reveal what a severe limit on personal rights this is. Especially as we are being surrounded by devices where &quot;reverse engineering&quot; is the only way to determine what they do.<p>Such laws are no less than restrictions on what we are allowed to discover about our environment.

It would be interesting to know how they would classify modern &quot;rented&quot; software like the Adobe CS Suite or Office 365. They are installed on your machine but works like SaaS.<p>It&#x27;s kind of a gray area for me at least, does it mean you own a copy or not? I&#x27;m sure it doesn&#x27;t but I also know that legal system do not generally deal in shades, they are binary, either a or b.<p>If it legally means that you own a copy, this would in theory allow you to patch the online checking out of it to keep it running.

Nice to see the court confirm the law is as broad as it was taken to be, and that it can&#x27;t be worked around with EULA bullshit.

Wait is decompolation ever forbidden anywhere? Why? I’m not reproducing anything until I use anything I learned producing something similar, at which point I might be in trouble (at least if I publish the reproduction).<p>But forbidding decompilation? That’s like forbidding someone to buy a car to take it apart and learn exactly how it was put together - which is what every manufacturer does with competitors’ cars.

People are definitely gonna use this ruling to justify reverse engineering games to modify the game design, claiming that the balancing&#x2F;mechanics are &quot;buggy&quot;. Some of that will be in earnest, some of it will be cover for pirates. The stuff that will be in earnest will make for some interesting arguments about who really owns a game design once it&#x27;s out in the world, and what constitutes a bug vs a design choice&#x2F;flaw

Can someone share cases&#x2F;anecdotes of decompiling software to fix a bug? Never done it myself nor heard someone doing that. Unless you consider not being able to run a program without license a bug :)

IANAL but what&#x27;s the point&#x2F;use of having a rule (like an EULA that forbids decompilation) that cannot be enforced?

This sounds incredible, does it allow for redistribution of the fixed product? Or is it just for the purposes of notifying the creator of the problem and its solution in one go?

I hope somebody in the EU uses this to sell kits that rid Deere &amp; co. equipment of its notorious maintainability bugs.

I don&#x27;t see how the ruling helps.<p>1. The copyright holder can include a dummy clause in the contract that prohibits decompilation, except if there is a written permission from the copyright holder, or in cases where existing local laws permit it. This is sufficient to turn down the part of the law that applies only where there is no such clause.<p>2. The copyright holder can always claim that decompilation is never necessary for the user to have the errors in the program corrected, or to achieve interoperability. &quot;Indeed, all the user had to do is to pay $1000000000 for UltraPremium support&quot;.<p>P.S. I am not a lawyer.

Next step: extremely large fines for putting such provision on EULA.

If the legal system was anything but a farce all EULAs and TOSs would be declared invalid, as all parties are aware that they aren&#x27;t being read before being agreed to.

What about Fonts? Can someone find a &quot;bug&quot; in the font and fix it according to their taste?

I thought EULA&#x27;s are not really worth anything anyway, cus if a case actually comes to court any EULA is usually ignored, cus all users ignore them + they often have loads of illegal stuff in them.

Well, cool. It’s nice that it’s allowed now. Now please make it feasible or, better yet, unnecessary.

This will definitely encourage the production of bug-free commercial software.

Meta: .jsf? I thought Java Server Faces died a decade ago.

will this allow decompilation of EU politicians so we can fix them?

&gt;the act of correction of its errors, may not be prohibited by contract<p>what is considered an &quot;error&quot; here? If I think Spotify made an &quot;error&quot; by calling up ads on their free tier, am I still following their ToS if I decompile and patch the app to remove ad code?

And suddenly it became legal to decompile code to find exploits. Awesome!

I am not a legal expert at all, but I guess this blurs a bit more the separation between open source and closed source...<p>It looks like the only remaining issue is the licensing model, which would need to consider the legislation on where the software is acquired or executed.<p>EULAs will probably be rewritten, lawyers will profit.

I dislike this ruling, because:<p>1. It affirms the legal right of people or abstract entities to prevent you from copying information - that is, to have the state punish you for copying information from one page to another or from one file to another. This is immoral, anti-social.<p>2. It affirms the legal right to prevent you from creating modified, adapted, combined or partial versions of a piece of software or text, when you have a copy of the entire original.<p>3. It only allows decompilation by someone who has paid for the right to hold a copy of a program, and then only for the purpose of getting the program to work properly.<p>Now, you could say &quot;but that&#x27;s EU law&quot; - and while that&#x27;s true, but it doesn&#x27;t make it any better. People should face no negative consequences for making copies of things, whether exact or modified.