* You do it only for your personal use or for "educational purposes" (i.e. study)
* You do not use big chunks of the code for applications you SELL
You may for instance completely modify Wordpad for your personal use, as I did, in order to have as defaults *.txt, *.alf and *.asm instead of the almost useless *.doc
You may rip off whatever code you want from whichever application you want in order to use it, modify it, squash it with a mace or throw it away :-)
Well, let's demonstrate it... here is the law:
European Union Directive, (Software Copyright Protection) 14 May 1991:
Article 6: Decompilation 1. The authorization of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form within the meaning of Article 4 (a) and (b) are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met:...This, translated, means that you do not need "the authorization of the rightholder" like you would for 4a (temporary reproduction of a program) or 4b (translation, adaption, arrangement and any other alteration of a program) if this is necessary to debug and/or run the crap you have bought. The "following conditions" are that you do it yourself and only insofern as you deem to need it really.
Note -what's even MORE important for reverse engineering- that at article 5 there are some EXCEPTIONS to the restricted acts:
Article 5: Exceptions to the restricted acts 1. In the absence of specific contractual provisions, the acts referred to in Article 4 (a) and (b) 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. 2. The making of a back-up copy by a person having a right to use the computer program may not be prevented by contract insofar as it is necessary for that use. 3. The person having a right to use a copy of a computer program shall be entitled, without the authorization of the rightholder, to observe, study or test the functioning of the program in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the program if he does so while performing any of the acts of loading, displaying, running, transmitting or storing the program which he is entitled to do.
Quite right! Obviously there cannot be a "looking under the cover is forbidden" policy, which would lame all technical development (it's already lamed enough like it is now), therefore you may observe, study or test the functioning of any program you fancy (the reason is that they could not have forbidden it anyway :-) sipping your favourite Martini
There is another point at art.7.1.(c) that refers to "technical devices which may have been applied to protect a computer program", which could be of interest for us:
...Member States shall provide, in accordance with their national
legislation, appropriate remedies against a person committing...
(c) any act of putting into circulation, or the possession for commercial purposes
of, any means the sole intended purpose of which is to facilitate the unauthorized
removal or circumvention of any technical device which may have been applied to
protect a computer program.But this refers -at most- to dongles-cracking and it is clearly intended for mass-burning of pirated cd-roms (which BTW is a big industry in the far East and in the Ex-Yugoslavian Lilliput states)
US law seems to be more restrictive (which is obvious, given the way our planet is ruled, since the States lead themselves the software industry and therefore defend their own interests... software protection laws will probably be much more permissive only when the new software will be mainly produced by the poor countries), see, for the differences between European Union's laws and US' laws , the articles at
http://www.ipww.com/mar96/p13world.htmlHere is an interesting snippet about disassembling and law in the States, 1992
Disassembly of Object Code
Sega v. Accolade, decided by the Ninth Circuit in 1992, makes clear that, in certain instances, the unauthorized disassembly of a computer program's object code in order to derive source code is not a copyright infringement. The Ninth Circuit applied the 'fair use' balancing test to determine that Accolade's use of reverse engineering techniques to produce an 'intermediate copy' of Sega's source code did not constitute copyright infringement. Accolade never distributed the intermediate copy commercially, but instead used it only to extract unprotectable ideas ‹ a sequence of bytes which act as a software key ‹ from Sega's game program. This key was then incorporated into Accolade's games, enabling them to 'unlock' and run on Sega's game platforms. The court cautioned, however, that disassembly involves the making of a literal copy of a program, and it is permissible only when necessary to extract the unprotectable ideas. It is unclear how far this fair use right extends.
This brings us nowhere... the whole subject seems pretty unregolated as for now... it would be worth to examine and "reverse engineer" (if you are a lawyer or a specialist in applied semantics) the various "scarecrow" information that we always find inside all software packages... some of them are so severe and unpolite that seem written by an Orwellian fanatic or a "Farenheit 451" follower :-). See below about this aspect.
Now the "why we crack" part: We are defeating mainly copy protection schemes (but see my two lessons on how to completely reverse engineer a Windows 3.1 application) bacause that's fun, and this way we can get a lot of people on the bandwagon, for the challenge, and because we believe firmly that every knowledge (in fact I believe everything) should be free (in the web and in the whole world)... but we are doing NOTHING at all compared with that what is really happening around you:
Every program you can think of can be found on the web, (in
thousand different ftps) in
its COMPLETE version many WEEKS before it ever appears in the best shops, as everyone
with intelligence level "eggplant" soon discovers.There are obviously differences among all the stupid countries of the planet... You may want to have a look
here in order to
consider where you would be able to buy/produce pirated software or where you should install your server for more "aimed" reverse
engineering activities or whatever:-) Besides, since there are "money" and "tax" paradises (and -how funny- nobody makes much
fuss about that), why shouldn't there exist "software" paradises? (Obvious answer: because money paradises are useful for the rich, software
paradises would be useful for the poor :-(
And that's the huge "illegal" part of it, but there is also a huge "legal" pirating (forced by the fierce concurrence in the software market and by the mere existence of the warez scene on the Web):
Programs and applications are being now sold on Magazine's CD-ROMs IN THEIR COMPLETE VERSION few months after their first appearence for next to nothing... this began in Europe 5 months ago and the rithmus (and the quality of the software) has increased enormously: I saw some days ago Panzer general 2 complete (CD Player n.19), Ticonderoga complete (both not at all so old games: late 1996!) Database 5 and the whole Lotus set '97 complete and unrestricted (PcPlus 35b, with the complete Borland Delphi 1 and the complete "ImagePals" as well) on various magazine's cd-rom. The same Lotus set was, for instance, sold in its boxes at the software retailer for TWENTY times the magazine price, it may sound illogic, but it is exactly so... Lotus is scared dead to disappear (thanks to the Micro$oft war against all other software producers... funny, there never seem to be any law against this kind of actions , btw :-( and Lotus is therefore compelled, like Netscape, to give away for free its software just in order to survive... yet even these magazines with 600 megabytes of good software on them every month are selling less and less (hence the fierce concurrence) because everything is already on the web for free...
And all this is only the top of the Iceberg: Hundred of THOUSAND of BBS all around the world push around tons of Megabytes of pirated software, which to day you may easily burn on cd-roms in order to distribute them at your friends on your birthday party. Cheaper than buying a cake
And that was for the big commercial" software companies. Shareware programmers are NOT damaged by good crackers (who study assembly and are mostly programmers themselves) but by themselves, when they program with useless overbloated languages huge toy-applications and by "serial numbers aficionados", people that prepare and distribute huge lists with millions of validation codes that you can find everywhere on the web.
On our pages there is not a single pirated copy of software... we do not need pirated copies since we are able to crack them in spades anytime we fancy (or to fetch them immediately from the web... we don't even need to keep programs on our harddisk any more, would be like hoarding leaves in a forest) besides we do not even care much for the software we crack... in fact (apart our beloved Softice) we are much more interested in the protection schemes themselves than in the software they protect, which most of the time is pure crap. As you'll see in some examples of +ORC's tutorial and in many students' essays, we even AMELIORATE the programs we crack.
We do not steal, we study, and the software development will soon depend (and in part depends already) from the capacities that we (and almost nobody else) are developing: who else if not a cracker will in few years time be able to compact and ameliorate already existing, lame applications? I believe the society is already changing, and in my opinion the fact that you have worked in something like the +HCU will soon open you quite a lot of doors :-)
As you'll read on the (very important)
student page, one of our problems, is that
the protection schemes are (mostly) incredibly stupid. That's why we have decided to
begin writing and devising much stronger protection schemes ourselves... for the challenge and in order
to improve ourselves, seen that the commercial programmers are
not able to give us any "cheap thrills" any more... how could they? Most programmers
seem to work
for useless money, not for the (very important) pleasure, nor for the only thing that really
matters in this new age we are already in: knowledge!