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Comment by fabianhjr | Hacker News Reader

> It seems like you could create quite a business being able to crack this software. Companies would pay tens of thousands to get these machines running.

That would be against the copyright holder interests because as you point out:

> Often times the 'new' version of the hardware and software is $100,000 US.

An as per the Disney lobbied US copyright law you would have to wait at least the life of the author + 70 years or 95 years from publication depending on some circumstances.

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The supplier of the "new" software often isn't the same as the (usually defunct, hence the trouble) legacy supplier.

That doesn't mean the copyright ownership disappeared. Those either got acquired/merged into another entity or liquidated in case of bankruptcy.

Right, but that's unlikely to be a scenario where there's any enforcement going on.

If this were tried, the present copyright holders would come out of the woodwork and enforcement would happen pretty quickly.

That's irrelevant in many cases where you want to support existing hardware. Clean room reverse engineering for interop purposes is allowed under copyright law.

Sure, but in fairness, this thread is about bypassing the copy protection in the existing software. Which I'm also arguing is safe, but it is not as obviously safe as a clean room reverse engineering effort.

Are there actual cases of this on the books?

I'd be pretty surprised if a judge was like "ah yes the defendant's consultancy modified a piece of industrial control software that you haven't given a thought to in three decades to make it run on a modern computer and not require a parallel port dongle, and that's definitely a DMCA violation and you've been harmed by it and deserve all the money."

"Laches" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity) is probably a relevant concept here. In a scenario like the one you're describing, the delay is likely to be taken into account, but it's unlikely to be the whole of the argument.

As I understand it (IANAL), the delay period for laches only starts when the complainant becomes aware of the violation.

I'll reiterate my comment from a few parents up: This is currently happening, and no, the copyright holders either don't even know, don't care, or are truly gone (even as far as being deceased.)

And the software is most likely owned by the competitor that sells said "new" software that most likely doesn't fit the niche anymore. They normally refuse to re-license even without having to give updates/support.

The hardware failing doesn't take away their legal right to operate the software, does it? (Maybe the contract says "for the life of this dongle?")

Is it even illegal to crack software? Cracking copy protection is not the same as software piracy.

Laws will vary worldwide. For the US I believe the DMCA makes circumvention a crime. This was why the DeCSS number was illegal.

There may be b2b contracts in addition to what the law says, but I believe the DMCA has an interoperability exception. I'm curious if "getting it to run on new hardware" is enough for that to trigger.

It's a violation unless you have rights to use the work. This was added after the first revision, probably because they were worried about a challenge to the DMCA on these grounds striking more of the law's text.

So, below, you have people wondering about cracking machine equipment. Totally legal to do.

*Deep breath* *Opens can of worms*

What about defining the equipment as "repairably broken" and asserting that circumventing the license protection falls within right to repair?

*Opens even bigger can of worms*

What about invoking this in a situation where someone's using an older piece of equipment and does not want to pay for example $500k, $1m, or more to green-field replace an entire installation when 99% of the existing system has perhaps a decade or more life left in it?

I'm not entirely read up on the finer points of the John Deere tractor situation (which is kind of the current poster child for this whole thing), but I actually think the above arguments actually resonate with the precedent set by this particular case.

I did try to search for John Deere to remind myself before posting because I wanted to draw that link, but the best I could find was that farmers were installing software from Russia (where it's widely available, unlike the US) to enable repairs. The articles didn't say this was illegal (which makes sense under my limited understanding of the DMCA), but did mention it'd break warranty under current rules.

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