Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That's a legal contract that you, as a buyer, are freely and willingly entering into.
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Correct. But let us dig into the essence of that contract, for the sake of argument. By signing that contract, you are giving Amazon
the right to terminate the contract if you engage in reverse engineering.
However, the contract itself is
not outlawing, nor it can, the reverse engineering. Please correct me if I am wrong, but, at least on North American continent, I believe that it is
not against the law to reverse engineer a product to figure out how to interface to it, or how to add a feature to it. If a piece of, let's be more specific, code contains an intellectual property protected by a patent, you can not use the knowledge gained by reverse engineering to create a competitive product, etc.
A
huge chunk of Open Source code base, particularly the stuff related to conversion of, say, Microsoft file formats to import and use the data, is done by reverse engineering. Nvidia nForce2 ethernet driver, specifically, was directly implemented as a result of reverse engineering, etc.
The person hacking a Kindle has forfeited his contractual right to utilize Amazon services and product support, but that's all.