"No reverse engineering" is a pretty standard TOS item.
Also, breaking the TOS is usually not illegal. TOS of a random company is not the law, otherwise you would get into trouble non-stop from random websites and apps making you "agree" to things.
In Apple's iMessage TOS? I don't find that likely but open to being wrong.
> Also, breaking the TOS is usually not illegal
In general, contracts are legally binding, therefore breaking them is illegal. Sometimes contracts include clauses that can't be legally binding, but I don't think a TOS forbidding this type of behavior would be questionable in the slightest. Apple obviously has no obligation to allow anyone to use its platform as a backend for their own (previously commercialized) product.
In EU law. No contract or license may restrict your right to reverse engineer or decompile for the purpose of interoperability or building an alternative implementation.
Not quite a carte blanche protection in the EU, either.
Terms of Service are just... the terms you need to follow in exchange for service. If you violate the terms, you get cut off from service... which they already did
I think Beeper is intentionally aiming for (heavily publicized) litigation to set a precedent.
Not a lawyer but I don't see what else could be true here. I suppose you could say the end users are the ones violating the TOS? I don't think it'll land with any judge, "your honor we just did the reverse engineering (without signing a TOS) and sold it to our users (who did sign a TOS, but didn't reverse engineer), so we're all clean."
During setup, Apple's servers return authorization keys for your device to use.
Seems pretty clear cut to me.
Fortunately, courts aren't computers, judges aren't compilers, and legal code isn't a programming language.
"Authorization" in the legal sense != authorization in the cryptographic sense. You can get a token and still be not legally authorized to access a system.
Accessing a public server using the public protocol it advertises is generally allowed.
It is possible to put unenforceable terms in a TOS, but it's simply untrue that "TOSes are not legally binding."
What do you think is the distinction between a legally binding contract and a TOS?
In a similar vein: has any maker of web scraping tools been sued by a website? I couldn't find anything.