EU resident here. Reverse engineering in general is allowed, but decompiling software adds a good number of restrictions[1].
Disclaimer: I have talked to lawyers. Our company makes industrial IoT loggers and during my career I have only been given appropriate documentation twice by manufacturers. Most of the systems have been reverse engineered through packet capture.
Even with documentation you still get garbadge. I've had to decompile a HSM firmware to figure out what the actual input of functions was since the manufacturer kept claiming the documentation was correct. It wasn't even close. Only after I provided the solution to my own support ticket they changed the documentation (why bother paying for full support...).
I've gotten a bit of empathy for the poor front support guy since he'd have to keep complaining to the developers which kept saying "no it's fine as documented".
Brazil also allows non-clean room reverse engineering (I still don't understand why we're not a rev-eng tech hub, come to Brazil my Ghidra/IDA users) and have much saner laws regarding piracy (like it being legal for 24h for testing), I've only ever seen big pirates (those who have piracy streaming websites) getting busted, I don't ever use a VPN and had no issues whatsoever with my piracy (have been a pirate for almost 20yrs now).
EU resident here. Reverse engineering in general is allowed, but decompiling software adds a good number of restrictions[1].
Disclaimer: I have talked to lawyers. Our company makes industrial IoT loggers and during my career I have only been given appropriate documentation twice by manufacturers. Most of the systems have been reverse engineered through packet capture.
[1] https://vidstromlabs.com/blog/the-legal-boundaries-of-revers...
> given appropriate documentation
Even with documentation you still get garbadge. I've had to decompile a HSM firmware to figure out what the actual input of functions was since the manufacturer kept claiming the documentation was correct. It wasn't even close. Only after I provided the solution to my own support ticket they changed the documentation (why bother paying for full support...).
I've gotten a bit of empathy for the poor front support guy since he'd have to keep complaining to the developers which kept saying "no it's fine as documented".
Brazil also allows non-clean room reverse engineering (I still don't understand why we're not a rev-eng tech hub, come to Brazil my Ghidra/IDA users) and have much saner laws regarding piracy (like it being legal for 24h for testing), I've only ever seen big pirates (those who have piracy streaming websites) getting busted, I don't ever use a VPN and had no issues whatsoever with my piracy (have been a pirate for almost 20yrs now).