Adobe EULA [LWN.net]

Adobe EULA

Posted Apr 7, 2007 14:52 UTC (Sat) by kevinbsmith (subscriber, #4778)
Parent article: Two approaches to Flash

I expected more discussion about the horrible EULA terms mentioned in the last question. For the curious, the Flash Player EULA seems to be posted here: http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/players/flash/

From my reading (I am not a lawyer), it seems like the prohibition on reverse engineering (section 2.5.1) only applies as long as the agreement is in force.

Oddly there is no section explaining how the agreement might be terminated by either party. I would have thought they would reserve the right to terminate your license at any time for any reason. Regardless of that, sections 7 and 8 explicitly remain in force after termination, but none of the other sections are so indicated, so my assumption would be that any rights and responsibilities in those other sections would only remain in force as long as the agreement as a whole remains in force.

Section 4 offers the ability to transfer ALL your rights to another party. So unless there is some legalese I'm missing, it seems like a developer who has been contaminated by agreeing to this license could transfer their rights away to someone else (presumably a non-developer), and then become clean. Only sections 7 and 8 should still apply to them.

If I were a contaminated developer who wanted to work on one of these projects, I would at least go through the formality of a transfer, because it is easy and might provide at least a little defense in court.

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Adobe EULA - our responsibility for promoting open standards

Posted Apr 12, 2007 17:24 UTC (Thu) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]

Yes. It's pretty clear that Adobe don't want people developing alternative Flash implementations; apparently they have been given the opportunity to give the "all clear" to these projects but have not done so.

We all need to question how it came to be that closed proprietary formats like Flash and WMV have come to the prominence that they have. I think that the basic answer is that these formats are better than the open alternatives, and that this superiority (*) has trumped the openness issue. This reflects badly on the people who have developed the inferior formats, and just as much on the rest of us who have not done our bit to help invent, implement and refine these formats more efficiently than people like Adobe and Microsoft.

I fear that in cases like Flash, we're doomed. Even if we were to invent a superior open alternative to Flash, existing mindshare would prevent it from becoming widely adopted. But we don't need to get it wrong next time, with the next technological wave - whatever that turns out to be.

I would like to encourage developers like Rob and Benjamin to carefully consider what they work on next. Please, find some new and growing area that interests you and develop an _open_ standard.

(*) superior in terms of functionality, ease of use, quality of implementation, documentation, having a sexy name and cool logo, being well marketed etc. etc.

Adobe EULA

Posted Apr 14, 2007 1:23 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link]

From my reading (I am not a lawyer), it seems like the prohibition on reverse engineering (section 2.5.1) only applies as long as the agreement is in force.

I thought the right to reverse engineer was protected by patent and copyright law in the US. Can a EULA overrule this law, or am I mistaken about it?

Adobe EULA

Posted Apr 29, 2007 15:58 UTC (Sun) by martinwguy (guest, #44989) [Link]

Hi!
I'm a Gnash developer, and we have taken professional legal advice on this issue. It turns out that the Macromedia/Adobe EULA is illegal in the EU and unenforcable in the US.
However even a lawsuit that is doomed to fail would still cost a developer lot of time, distraction, expense and patience, so we prefer to play it safe.
In practice there are plenty of people who are not programmers or reverse engineers, who are happy to run test movies for us and send us screenshots of what the output should look like.