On 22-Jan-2010, at 17:42, Ian Stirling wrote: > There is a third alternative. > B) obtain the decoded tables from a third party in a country where this > decryption is not illegal. > > I am unsure of the legality of this. It would of course imply that the device > would need an internet connection - but...
I know some consumer electronics manufacturers have been known to do things which many would consider lacking in sanity, I’m not convinced any would go this far (if they were prepared to do this, there’s a good chance they’d probably just reverse-engineer them themselves and pretend they’re doing this ;) Of course, from an anti-piracy perspective, as soon as ONE person leaks the tables, all bets are off. As much as the BBC will claim the tables are its “intellectual property”, from what I know of copyright law it would be difficult to claim that they were © BBC; no other part of the various IP laws both applies here and provides for any kind of protection which can be aggressively defended in court. At absolute _best_ it's a grey area. This does lead into a further question as to whether reverse-engineering or leaking a table of numbers which are shared amongst a great many people and organisations under the sole protection of a non-disclosure agreement really constitutes circumvention of a copyright protection measure in terms congruent with our laws on the matter. If _not_, the whole exercise would be a huge waste of time and money (that would be licence-fee-payer’s money, by the way). As I said on the blog, this couldn’t be more flawed if they’d tried. M. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
