Guillermito versus TEGAM

Sad things on the French legal front: the appeal court has decided to confirm the first judgement, on the following grounds:

• Guillermito did, and admitted to, use a warez copy of VIGUARD, since he was in the USA, and the program was only sold in France. This, however, is clearly copyright infringement.

• Guillermito is accused of having disassembled the binary (even though he always denied it), which is only allowed under French law for purposes of interoperability, which wasn't the case here. He also replicated some parts of the original software (an 80 bytes very weak encryption key) which was distributed with his weakness analysis tool on the Internet. And this is considered as another copyright infringement by the judge !

A detailed explanation of the text is available here (French only).

I don't have any problem with the first point, but the second one is simply scary, because it is difficult to understand what kind of legal ramifications it could have in the future. I also don't know if the situation would have been different, would Guillermito had a valid VIGUARD license. I'll try do document myself on the details of our own IP laws before making more comments on the topic.

Apart from that, Guillermito has been sentenced to pay about 15.000€, which is a lot, even if this is several order of magnitudes less than what TEGAM was asking for. Talk about chilling effects !!

If you want to cheer him up a bit, you can help him buy a new but expensive anti-virus though. I just donated 100€.

Note that this software promises to protect your PC against voodo, black eye, and other bad lucks. I guess it's what they call truth-in-marketing.