Decompilation Legalities in Australia

One of the foundation of Australia's Copyright laws is that of a 'fair go'. It's not fair to other people if you lock away access to your services. That is why the right to Reverse Engineer software for compatibility or research purposes has been baked into our laws, and the interpetation of our laws, for many years.

If you're unfamiliar with this, a good read is this paper on Reverse Engineering from 2003, which goes over how other parts of the world treat reverse engineering. (Please ignore the typo in the title!)

The results of this is that it explains, in simple terms, how the Fair Dealings provision of the Copyright Act works, and makes it clear that no copyright infringement exists if:

• label The program is made from a legimate copy;
• label Copying is for the purpose of obtaining information to make independently another program or article to connect to and be used together with or otherwise interoperate with the original;
• label Copying is only to the extent reasonably necessary;
• label The extent of reproduction or adaptation of the original program must be limited to that required to enable the new program to connect to, or otherwise interoperate with, the original program;
• label The information referred to above is not readily available when the reproduction or adaptation is made.

Luckily, as there is no Public API at the present time we are legally permitted to reverse engineer PGO to produce software (and hardware) that is compatible.