Originally Posted by Seerah
Peggle does not have a license which allows you to "reverse engineer" and "ninja" its code.  |
IANAL. My brief research into the DMCA's
reverse engineering exemption says that reverse engineering is okay to achieve "interoperability". "Interoperability" is defined as "the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged". In this case, as nothing is trying to inter-operate with Peggle, it doesn't look like it's covered.
So, to sum up: the obfuscation in Peggle probably qualifies as "a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" meaning that, unless it's for "interoperability", reverse engineering the obfuscation is not protected under the DMCA.
It is almost certainly denotatively illegal to remove the obfuscation from the Peggle source code. (...for any purpose other than to achieve "interoperability" with it.)
Personally, it would probably be the last addon on my list of addons to look for good code in. Given the fact that there is almost certainly an un-obfuscated addon that has frame code that does what you were looking for properly, getting down to Peggle on the list of addons to check would almost certainly never happen.*
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* That said, if
somehow Peggle was my last bastion of hope in a miraculously disastrous sequence of attempts to learn what I needed to learn by other means... They can't be calling any API other than the API we are all using. At the point of last resort, if reading their code improves my understanding of how to call the API, what to provide to it and in what order it should be called, I don't consider such learning to be profiting from another party's novel implementation. There is likely a discrete set of "correct" ways to configure frames' properties and behaviors. To me, seeing a "correct" way of doing something in Peggle's code and using the information to make one's own code more correct does not diminish their copyright.