| > It used to be that Flash's terms forbade you from ever working on a competing Flash implementation. ...how have I never heard of that? That seems like a really easy thing to get thrown out in court. Wikipedia gives me something that sounds more reasonable: > The file format specification document is offered only to developers who agree to a license agreement that permits them to use the specifications only to develop programs that can export to the Flash file format. The license forbids the use of the specifications to create programs that can be used for playback of Flash files. Which is not an issue of accepting the EULA and running Flash, but of getting specs for Flash and, well, developing a competing product. Asinine, but less insane. That's more in the realm of "IP law, and attitude towards IP, sucks" than "accepting Flash EULA is wrongbad". The intent of 3.2 sounds like it's to prevent stuff like internal company file servers from keeping a copy of Flash around. I could see it being bent to make the VM spin-up illegal, but that's it. I could see 4.1 being an issue, since it seems to be a deliberate way to keep Flash from being run on VMs, but I've run Flash on development VMs for the purposes of debugging embeds before and it never came up. My instinct, despite IANAL, is that I'm interpreting it wrong and it has nothing to do with VMs and so is inapplicable. 9.5 isn't relevant unless watching a Livestream over Flash on a VM causes you harm... 15 isn't relevant unless you're a "business or organization", and I strongly doubt that a court would allow that to extend to an individual proprietor of any kind. 4.5 would be a good reason not to do it if you had any intention of ever reverse-engineering Flash. I can see that persisting, but I also have my doubts as to whether that's sneak's reasoning. So, in short... I am guessing that there's no established precedence to prevent you from accepting a EULA on a VM that disallows running said software on said VM. That would be a fun court case to watch. Thus, the main legal hurdle is the possibility of reverse-engineering Flash. (And yeah, I'm too lazy to read the T&C myself. Sorry.) |