[sword-devel] Re: Importing from biblegateway.com

[Jack Lewis]

JH wrote:
> Jack Lewis wrote:
> 
>> Disclaimer: IANAL.
>>  
>>
> Same here.
> 
>> Reverse engeering for compatability is legal in the United States and
>> Europe.  Examples include Samba, WINE, Accolade vs. Sega, Linux (from
>> UNIX), Kaffe (from Java).  Here is some info:
>>  
>>
> As I understand it, (I have not looked into this in a while and the law 
> may have changed, I hope it did) while it is in some cases legal to 
> reverse engineer, it is not legal to circumvent an accesses control. 
> There was not even an exclusion to the law for public domain texts, 
> which was discussed when exclusions were considered. So, if the software 
> that the work is accessed through can be considered to have an access 
> control, circumventing that access control by reverse engineering would 
> not be legal.

Yes, that's what the The Digital Millennium Copyright Act does.  It 
prevents circumvention, but is interesting there have been exceptions to 
that law:

http://www.eff.org/endangered/list.php#remote
http://www.eff.org/endangered/list.php#toner

But of course, the DMCA has been upheld in circumvention:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/54063/judge-finds-dvd-x-copy-breaches-dmca.html

Fortunately, I don't see circumvention in this case.  I see creating 
comptability with other formats.