[aur-general] Flashplugin DRM free?

Callan Barrett wizzomafizzo at gmail.com
Thu Apr 10 04:13:27 EDT 2008


On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Ondřej Kučera <ondrej.kucera at centrum.cz> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>

Even if it was technically legal to keep a PKGBUILD on the AUR I don't
think it should be home to this sort of crap. JaDa, you haven't given
any real reason for what you're talking about other than telling
everyone you're completely ignorant of what DRM actually is and what
flash player actually does regarding it. Can someone delete the
duplicate package from the AUR? I'm sure nobody else is going to steal
your great idea so no need to park the name.

-- 
Callan 'wizzomafizzo' Barrett


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