Does anyone what the legal status of running this operation over commercial software would be?
The reason you need a licence to use software is because your CPU makes a copy of the program (in RAM) and this would otherwise violate the programmer's copyright. I believe that the licensing terms are generally pretty strict, e.g. one copy, to RAM only. Therefore, I'm not sure you'd be permitted to take a copy of their program, mangle it and dump it back out to disk.
Does anyone know of any reason why this would be permitted, or how people intend to get round this problem?
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I believe there is a loophole in that law, as described in Wikipedia's software licence article.
y right
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_licence#Cop
Does anyone what the legal status of running this operation over commercial software would be?
The reason you need a licence to use software is because your CPU makes a copy of the program (in RAM) and this would otherwise violate the programmer's copyright. I believe that the licensing terms are generally pretty strict, e.g. one copy, to RAM only. Therefore, I'm not sure you'd be permitted to take a copy of their program, mangle it and dump it back out to disk.
Does anyone know of any reason why this would be permitted, or how people intend to get round this problem?
I appear to have been reading too much groklaw.