Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:03:50 -0700, Darren New wrote:
> 
>> Right. That's why I said "DMCA notwithstanding".
> 
> Problem is, we can't choose to ignore DMCA.  I'm not sure I follow you 
> here.

I meant my opinion/analysis was "DMCA notwithstanding."  Not that the actual 
law is. I.e., I don't know enough about DMCA to say how it might have 
changed the landscape, so if you ignore the DMCA, then what I said is valid. :-)

> But in the case you put forth, use of a program that is restricted in 
> platform through technological means is not use of the program "as 
> intended".  I guess part of the question is "intended by whom?".

True, true. Again, hard to say.

> Taking Jeremy's suggested idea, I purchase a program that's developed to 
> run on the Mac, but I don't have a Mac.  If my intention is the important 
> one and my intention is to run it on a Linux-based PC, would it be legal 
> for me to reverse-engineer the program in order to recompile it to run on 
> Linux?  I would seriously doubt that, and I think a challenge on that 
> basis would ultimately fail in court.

Sure. But this is the argument made by DeCSS authors: Nobody had a license 
to play the legally-purchased DVD on a Linux machine, so they circumvented 
the protection to make that possible. Of course, distributing a program that 
not only played the disk but made it possible to copy it was the bigger 
problem, I think. Makes it hard to separate out the different concerns in 
the court cases.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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