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Australia Make Software Reverse Engineering Legal

Posted by Roblimo on from the too-bad-all-governments-don't-do-this dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "The Australian government passed legislation yesterday guaranteeing the right to reverse engineer software for the purposes of diagnosing and fixing problems and for interoperability." Looks like WINE and other Windows emulation projects ought to be headquarted in Australia, doesn't it?

4 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. "WINE and other Windows emulation projects"? by Trepidity · · Score: 2

    Wine Is Not an Emulator, damnit!

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  2. Re:Thats a Good Thing .... by Arandir · · Score: 2

    You still need to source code for bug fixing. Replicating source code by way of reverse engineering is EXTREME tedium.

    Some things you can reverse engineer with relative ease, like API's, resource DLL's, file formats, etc. But generating human-readable source code from a non-trivial application isn't worth the effort it takes.

    --
    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  3. Complications by JonS · · Score: 2

    But the "cannot be used or communicated to others for any other purpose" clause would probably be used in cases where something like WINE is being developed to *replace* the product being reverse engineered.

  4. unfortunately there is an answer to this... by slew · · Score: 2

    There is a tax home (defined by the IRS and state law)
    There is a legal residence (in the US this is a combo of US and state laws)
    There is an effective location (defined by both for sales and property tax and breaking laws)

    These don't have to be the same place (or even only one place)... And usually, it's not to your
    advantage... They've got you coming and going...