Bug#48045: debian-policy: non-US is a misnomer
Chris Lawrence <quango@watervalley.net> writes:
> AFAIK there is no "perfect" regime in the world, and the political
> situation in many countries wrt. crypto (for example) is rather
> unstable. For example, the LinuxDVD code is probably only illegal in
> the UK, since the "rip" of the encryption algorithm was only illegal
> under Britain's copyright law.
IANAL but I'm pretty certain that one is completely within one's rights
in reverse engineering things in the UK.
Patents could be used to restrict those rights, except that we don't
recognise software patents in the UK.
Copyright has nothing to say about a work that involved a comparable
effort to produce as the ``original'' that inspired it, because
copyright for the facsimile would reside with the person that made it.
I don't know the details of this case, but I doubt very much that its
anything other than a large company unleashing their rabid lawyers, and
if it ever gets near a court in the UK, it will be thrown out.
That said, there are occasional rumblings of silly encryption laws
being introduced in the UK, but at present stand.org.uk seem to be
blocking that pretty effectively.
In conclusion, you could do a lot worse than the UK,
and we've got loads of bandwidth.
Cheers, Phil.
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