This could be the end of reverse engineering in France sadly, I hope it doesn’t have repucussions in other parts of the world.
I think it’s the end of using reverse engineering tools to find flaws in France. Maybe the next step will be to forbid the possession of debuggers and disassemblers.
It’s a valid course of action to reverse engineer software you have bought to make sure it’s secure. If not make your software open source.
Security expert Guillaume Tena, who was last week ordered to pay a fine of 14,300 euros for breach of French copyright law after publishing information about security vulnerabilities in an anti-virus application, has already collected around half the money in donations after appealing for help on his Web site.
On 21 February, Tena lost his appeal in a case involving vendor Tegam and was ordered to pay a fine of 14,300 euros (around AU$23,000) for breaking French copyright laws. Tena appealed for donations on his Web site — to buy a new anti-virus application because asking for donations to pay a fine is also illegal in France — and within a week he has already collected over 8,000 euros.
I say good for him.
Source: Zdnet
Effing unbelievable where this is all heading.
Simply because a few politicians fail to understand technology, these kinds of laws will definitely only make the future more and more insecure….
Not totaly sure how they got him for copy right, he didn’t copy any thing, or try to sell a “patched” version. Its not even like what comes out of a decompiler is any thing like what went in to the compiler.
But then its france, so what do you expect?
” a few politicians fail to understand technology”
Politicians have nothing to do in it. Guillaume Tena (known as Guillermito) was sued by an antivirus company. You’ d better say “judges fail to understand technology”, which is, here, rather true.
“Not totaly sure how they got him for copy right, he didn’t copy any thing, or try to sell a “patched” version.”
He didn’t sell anything, indeed, but he used cracked version, only for test (there’s no shareware version of this rather expensive AV) + one legal version gave by a ex-costumer, but he wasn’t sued for that. I mean, this was abandoned, anyway. He was condemned because he put some “proof of concept”, on his site. In theses POC, there was 65 bytes of the AV code : this is like 1/1000000 of the whole AV, but it was enough, as it appears, to condemn him.
If you know french, you can read his analysis here : http://web.archive.org/web/20030404161138/www.pipo.com/guillermito/viguard/index.html
That’s interesting.