[aur-general] Flashplugin DRM free?

[Ondřej Kučera]

Hi,

> I took the liberty of quickly reading through the EULA of Adobe Flash 
> Player. This is fairly straight forward:

> [Quote]
> 2.5  No Modification.

> 2.5.1  You may not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works
> based upon the Software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, 
> disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the 
> Software except to the extent you may be expressly permitted to 
> decompile under applicable law, it is essential to do so in order to 
> achieve operability of the Software with another software program, and
> you have first requested Adobe to provide the information necessary to
> achieve such operability and Adobe has not made such information 
> available. Adobe has the right to impose reasonable conditions and to 
> request a reasonable fee before providing such information. Any such 
> information supplied by Adobe and any information obtained by you by 
> such permitted decompilation may only be used by you for the purpose 
> described herein and may not be disclosed to any third party or used to
> create any software which is substantially similar to the expression of
> the Software. Requests for information should be directed to the Adobe
> Customer Support Department.
> [End Quote]

> You can find the source of this at 
> http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/players/flash/
> Under section 2.5 No Modification.

> In short this means you cannot redistribute your modified versions of 
> this software in a legal way unless you have their approval.

On the other hand - if it is only a PKGBUILD placed in unsupported,
nobody's doing any redistributing of their software. Also, all the
modifying is done by the end user, so it's up to them whether they
want to do this (and risk some legal issues) or not. Thirdly,
"illegal" is a word we should be careful about because each user is
living in a different country with different laws. Which means that
some parts of some EULAs might be simply invalid in some countries,
so some users don't have to care about those parts.

Not that I want to encourage the existence of the package (I don't
use Flash much and right now I'm totally uninterested in DRM flash
animations/applications, so I don't really care) but the way I see it
is this:
(1) It *might* be illegal to have said PKGBUILD available for
download from a webpage - this depends on the laws of the country
where aur.archlinux.org resides. So this should be checked first.
(2) If it is not the case, people responsible for running AUR are off
the hook and then it's up to the users - it *might* be illegal to use
the PKGBUILD to modify Adobe Flash in their country and it might not.

Hopefully I didn't make a mistake in my assumptions.

Ondřej


-- 
Cheers,
Ondřej Kučera