The brief quote here is:

"But Congress built a safety-valve of sorts into the law, giving the U.S. Copyright Office - part of the Library of Congress - the power to create exceptions to the DMCA to protect legitimate, non-infringing uses of copyrighted material. In October, 2000, when the law took full force, the office carved out two narrow exemptions: one allowing researchers to crack so-called "censorware" applications to learn what websites they block, and a second exemption for old computer programs and databases rendered unusable by a defective or obsolete access control mechanism."

Which means you are legally allowed to reverse engineer older software as long as it is research that allows an older, defective or outdated document or program to work again.

So in this case, let's say with FileMaker version 4 which was the last to ship for 68k macs, if I found a security flaw, I am legally allowed to patch it and reverse engineer it so this security threat is gone. And if Apple tried to sue, I am protected under the DMCA, that it was an outdated system that was rendered unuseable due to a security threat, hence I reversed engineered it to allow acces again in a manner that the author originally intended.

Cool eh?

So this means it's no longer illegal to open up those old applications that are so old and outdated that don't work no more. Like, you could patch a program that ran in system 6 to run in later systems and fear no evil.

:)

however, you COULD reverse engineer A/UX so that it's security holes were gone...

and maybe so that it could run apache
get MySQL and php on there, and we have a nice IW

AUX could be programmed for newer macs if you specifically needed PPC support and your applications were 68K, and you needed the extra PPC support. (Which AUX doesn't do)

But you would have to be carefull. Your hacking would need to show a true and reasonable desire. For example, if you have source code and compiled applications that no longer are supported and are known to be incompatible with newer Mac OS or Linux versions, such as older Classic applications, then you could get away with it, because migration may not be an option for you.

But you have to be carefull, a simple hack to enable PPC support for general use won't stand in court because you don't really really "need" it.

BoJ

This still does not give me the skill to circumvent my Studio Vision Pro key diskette!

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