/new_thread - for anyone reading, sorry, a new thread was kindly started by the admins but with a misleading title and now the proper context has been lost. Get out of it what you can.
A licensing agreement or Eula is not law… only Governments can make those. They are not law in the same way that even though a private bungee jumping company can get me to sign a waiver before I jump, that waiver is in no way legally enforceable, due to it’s violating other basic citizen’s rights. points out how a company will try to protect itself beyond what is necessarily legal by creating what it calls it’s own ‘laws’ (like ripping content). Whether a court will side, is another matter and should not be presumed barring precedent.
I think our debate here falls under what rights-holders don’t ‘want’ you to do… as opposed to what you are explicitly forbidden to do by your government. Again… a licensing agreement or Eula is a legal document but not itself a law… it references other laws and so companies will always try to control (justifiably I would add) their intellectual properties by adding their own conditions. These ‘laws’ do not (I believe) protect against reverse-engineering of any kind.