On Tue, Nov 16, 1999 at 09:49:34AM +0000, Philip Hands wrote: > > AFAIK there is no "perfect" regime in the world, and the political > > situation in many countries wrt. crypto (for example) is rather > > unstable. For example, the LinuxDVD code is probably only illegal in > > the UK, since the "rip" of the encryption algorithm was only illegal > > under Britain's copyright law. > > IANAL but I'm pretty certain that one is completely within one's rights > in reverse engineering things in the UK.
You are allowed to reverse engineer something in order to make something that will work with it; I believe it is not legal to reverse engineer something in order to compete with it. How this applies when what you actually reverse engineer is the file format, as here, I don't know, but I would expect it to be legal.
