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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

The rar license prohibits writing a compatible compressor? What kind of nonsense is that? I clicked the license link and there is a scary looking anti-reverse-engineering clause, but 1) that sounds legally dubious given how the program is distributed; and 2) there is a FOSS decompressor, and studying that may be sufficient to write a compressor without examining the non-free official compressor.

The article is right that there's not much good reason to use rar these days. It is still popular in some communities though. So I've had occasion to run the decompressor, though not the compressor as far as I can remember.

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From the winrar download page you can download the binaries directly without agreeing to any license, which means its clauses wouldn't apply.

It's already been established in the courts that merely using a piece of software does not imply acceptance of licensing terms; the parties must actively agree to it. That's why so many companies push in-your-face agreements that you must actively click "I agree" to.

Could I then download a zip of torvalds/linux from github and use it without abiding by the license as it’s never thrown in my face?

You can do that anyway, but if you wanted to break the license by distributing modified copies without providing sources, you would fall foul of copyright law.

When you open the source the license is there.

Yes. The GPL is not a license which dictates how you can use software, such as that you must not read it, or use ideas from it.

EULA restrictions like "no reverse engineering" are not rooted in copyright law, and borrowing ideas is in the realm of patents.

EULA's try to leverage copyright law in order to impose non-copyright restrictions, using the concept that if you violate any of the arbitrary non-copyright restrictions, the thereby violated license lapses, and that license is the document which allows you to have a copy of the software (not the fact that you paid).

I always found this aspect of 'copyright' very confusing. I still don't understand the legal basis here.

I don't fully understand it myself, because if you have a copy of the work (e.g. purchased copy of some proprietary software) the entity which distributed that to you was the copyright-holding purveyor. They did the copying, using their reserved right to do so.

No matter what yo udo with the copyrighted work, if you're not copying it, you're not infringing on copyright. The idea that your right to have a copy can lapse due to violating the EULA has holes in it, because copyright isn't about the right to have a copy, but about the right to produce and redistribute copies.

For instance, on a bit of a tangent here, if you steal a book out of someone's backpack, that is not copyright infringement, and cannot be. You didn't copy anything.

The proprietary EULA wants the law to believe that you're stealing if you continue to use the software after violating the agreement. But without connecting that to the concept of copyright infringement, the accusation has no basis, since you're just using what you paid for it.

Disassembling a binary executable to understand it is exactly the same as reading a book to understand it. Copyright is made for books and such.

Yes! Unlike other licenses, the GPL explicitly covers distribution, not use.

This is why people start putting license in a big comment at the top of source files. Also why when I write sites I require the create user call to include a "acceptTosAndLicense" or similar field set to true.

It would probably be possible to argue in court that your compressor isn't technically breaking any laws. But why go through the trouble of using formats which aren't meant to be used, when there are so many good alternatives out there which actually are intentionally freely available?

Clearly people who write licences want us to believe they are lawmakers. We need to clamp down on this and put them back in their place.

In some countries there's an exception in the copyright law if you're reverse engineering something to provide compatibility.

Also in many countries software / algorithm parents do no exist, so you could write your own rar utility.

Microsoft ASF/WMA also has a similar limitation, where it disallows writing an open source implementation if you use the official format specification.

Luckily it is too mostly irrelevant nowadays.

> Microsoft ASF/WMA also has a similar limitation,

Doesn't mean it would in court.

If you've got the resources to mount a credible legal defence against Microsoft

Microsoft ironically made its fortune by selling software that ran on IBM PC compatible x86 boxes, built around PC BIOS's that started from a clean room reimplementation of the reverse engineered IBM BIOS. IBM itself was not very significant in that market except at the very beginning. Clones for me, but not for thee.

I look back now at how weird it was going to the store looking for the IBM compatible computers amongst the Amiga, Apple's, Commodores and such.

Once you have fully "re-created the RAR algorithm" you would not need to license the official one anymore. So it's OK, just uninstall RAR from your computer at that point :)

Unar is a libre alternative.

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