[Wine] DMCA and EU Copyright laws

[James Mckenzie]

jtnire:

You really should consult a Solictitor to find out the answer but the non-lawyer types have this to think about:

The DCMA and other enforcement laws that relate to the enforcement of Digital Rights Management have no applicibility to Wine because there is no code included in the product release designed to bypass any form of encryption or operating system detection.  There are many programs that will not run on Wine, in native mode, specifically because Wine is not trying to be Windows (TM) in any form.  There are known security programs that will not function on Wine because they check for specific placement of code in some of the native Windows dynamically loaded library files (dlls).

If you plan on including Wine in a commercial product you do need to keep in mind that it is licensed under the Lesser GPL v 3 and you do have to make available the source code, if requested.

One other thing: Wine is developed using only Black Box discovery techniques.  No "peeking under the hood" is allowed and code developed using other than Clean Room processes is removed and discarded.  This is why code from the ReactOS project and others is not allowed into Wine unless the two statements are complied with.  Lessens legal issues you know.

That is the only legal issues I know of with Wine.

James McKenzie


-----Original Message-----
>From: jtnire <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
>Sent: Apr 27, 2010 6:36 AM
>To: wine-users at winehq.org
>Subject: [Wine]  Re: DMCA and EU Copyright laws
>
>
>> I am not a lawyer but I'd say you don't need to be one to discard
>> worries of this nature.
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>Sorry, can you just clarify the above?
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>Are you saying that I don't need to worry? Even if distributing WINE for commerical purposes?
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