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late2part parent
A lot of times when you use a product, you're required to agree to an EULA wherein you promise/commit to not reverse engineer a product or its protocols. If you did use snapchat as a registered user, this issue could affect you negatively.

Another alternative is to mail them back and ask them for clarification. Why do they consider it an infringement?

The law clearly states the following:

  (2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
  (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
  (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
  (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
The way I interpret this is that if one is overcoming some encryption or authentication scheme, it may be disallowed under the law. If one is simply observing a protocol online, then one may be doing something bad as this says.
PeterisP
It depends on your location - in sane jurisdictions, EULAs aren't worth the paper they're not written on. But it looks like that USA is not one of them.

At least for me any EULAs that aren't signed before purchase (i.e., all shrinkwrap or clickthrough "agreements") aren't binding unless I choose to - B2B sales with explicit signed contracts would be binding; or if I want to do something that by law requires permission (i.e., redistribution instead of just using the software) then I might accept an 'EULA' such as GPL.

belorn
Law always depend on the local jurisdiction. You are spot on that observation.

EULA is regarded as a contract in "most" (or all?) jurisdictions, and as such, depend on contract law to define what is allow and what isn't. EULA's is also regulated under consumer protection laws. Since each state in the USA have slightly different kind of consumer protection and contract law, one would really need to dig down into the law books to decide if the EULA is at all legally binding in a specific state.

But I have one correction to mention. Copyright licenses are not viewed as contract in the USA. Copyright licenses like GPL are granted permissions, waiving the right to sue distributors under specific situation. If the distributor get sued for distributing GPL software, then it is she who must raise the license as protection. "I got right to distribute this copyrighted work, because I received this license who says I can". The license "terms" only specifies under what situation permission have been given.

In EU however, licenses are contract and under contract law. As such, the permission to distribute can be revoked if contract law has been violated.

nathanb
Yeah, isn't that one of the things that ended up getting geohot in trouble with the PS3? They found an account where he had agreed to the TOS, thus putting him in violation of the same?

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