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Interesting question and answer, thanks for the link. To save others a click / searching for the relevant parts, these seem to be it: > since it's not copyright infringement for you to apply a patch, it's also not copyright infringement for someone to give you a patch. > For example, Galoob's Game Genie, which patches the software in Nintendo cartridges, does not infringe Nintendo's copyrights. ``Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play, for personal enjoyment, without creating a derivative work.'' For the EU, merely this is said: > The European Software Directive (adopted by the UK in 1992) gives users the freedom to copy, run, modify, and reverse-engineer lawfully acquired programs. Given the reasoning "if it's not copyright infringement to patch, it's also not infringement to give you a patch", which I honestly don't quite follow, this ought to mean that the law works the same way in the EU. (The reason I don't follow that logic is that copyright doesn't dictate what I can do with information I already have: it's about distribution as far as I know. So of course it's okay for me to apply a patch when not considering any law other than copyright (at least from my not-a-lawyer and European perspective), but that doesn't mean I can make what might perhaps be argued to be a derivative work and spread that around.) |