I have a series of products, that I purchased elsewhere that came with older compiled scripts that when using in PP2012 through off the bad magic number error. Elsewhere, is not going to provide updates or recompiled scripts to work in P9 or PP2012.

Is it legal or is it illegal for me to decompile the scripts and save as py's so I can use them for my own private use in PP2012 or for that matter future versions on Poser.

Granted if I did it and never said I word, nobody would "probably" know. Problem is part of the process uses an online service and I want to make sure I have where I sit down covered.

thanks in advance for any replies

Gary

Mainly depends on how your national law(s) and the EULA cover reverse engineering.

Pragmatically, if you're only one who's going to be using the results, then as you say it's really down to how you feel about it ethically.

Thanks nruddock. My conscience is why I asked. Not a vendor. Given away a few textures and a couple of product specific body pose files I made here and there on a very limited basis. I have done some beta testing for others. Primarily scripts to help the creator get them to work on a Mac in the past.

My biggest concern is the fact that a 3rd party does the decompiling and what happens to the code you load into their website. Granted Poser scripts are Poser only and not some type of python standalone app somebody could use without Poser if the website was gathering the uploded files. The site has been around for several years, and tried to find any negative comments other then which versions python it works with and which it does not, and found nothing.

Guess my good conscience and by evil conscience are going to have to keep their wrestling match going for a while.

Is it possible to ask the vendor for permission for personal use ?  they might not care if they dont plan on supporting it, or dont have a later version of Poser to use.

If you are going to contact the author, then why not suggest that if they aren't going to support it for new versions of Poser, that they release the source under an open source license of their choice.

The other alternative is to recreate the script's functionality and release that (and to assess how easy that would be we'd have to know what the script is).

Shoot I could recompile for them and hand it back and say here is your update :)

Problem in my opinion is the other market place, not the vendor when it comes to updates

Quote - Problem in my opinion is the other market place, not the vendor when it comes to updates

Unless the item was purchased outright by the "other market place" then the vendor retains all rights to the product and could issue an update independantly if they wanted to make one available.