Re:WebAssembly Specification Prototype
by rabbitfang48 on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @07:04PM
(#12090413)
I know of no country (or other jurisdiction) where a legal "right to decompile" exists.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Many countries allow reverse engineering, and you could infer a "right to decompile" from that in some cases, but as far as I know none of them place any requirement on the source to make it easy.
At most they legally protect someone who decides to run a disassembler or decompiler on a binary from prosecution or lawsuits (but only in as much as you don't use the result to violate copyright or other restrictions).
The EU has a very, very limited right to decompile for the sake of interoperability.
See Article 6 on http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...
And for personal modifications, and so on.
And "copying the decompiled source of the part of MS Word that reads .doc files" counts as covered, so, it's quite a lot.
Especially with websites, where you might want to interact with, or write addons interacting with, WASM threatens those rights.