DATEL Vs SONY - Legal Cracking?
looorg writes:
The Directive on the legal protection of computer programs does not allow the holder of that protection to prohibit the marketing by a third party of software which merely changes variables transferred temporarily to game console's RAM.
[...] The CJEU judgment clarifies the limits of copyright protection in respect of source/object code, while highlighting an area of freedom (subject to boundaries and conditions) in which data generated by software can be modified without triggering a lawsuit.
While in this case it's specifically about DATEL selling their various cheating devices. But it also kind of seems like the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) just made some versions of cracking software protections legal. As long as you leave the code alone in the executables and only do changes in RAM then it's all fine and dandy. So for example having another program that just patches part of the RAM while running or executing the code in RAM. It's not really harder to patch in more lives, infinite gold or just not checking for various protection mechanisms. Either removing them or just flipping some bits to everything is alright. Protection check passed. No copyright there.
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