Encrypted morally grey

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Guppy294

While briefly being mentioned earlier, I was curious if the encrypted manual can be decrypted pre-kickoff without bringing shame to the FIRST system. I would guess its ok to guess it Bc in last years hint, they used an anagrams of the password which wouldn't help anything otherwise.
So in short: did FIRST basically say it was legal to do this? If not, how?
(To be clear, I'm not saying I wish to do that, I'm just attempting to understand why first would (in my eyes) endorse such disgraceful behavior)

If there's no way you could rationally expect to be able to break the password,¹ is it really wrong to try (or to talk about trying)? No—because we can say with scientific rigour that you will not succeed, and thus no direct harm will come to the competition.² (Note that if you actually could break the encryption, this would be a different moral quandary.)

But that doesn't mean that people who don't understand the difficulty, or who understand but don't agree, will happily go along with your conclusion. FIRST could get mad at you (even in failure) and sanction you. That's not in the rulebook, but obviously FIRST has some practical capability to do things administratively.

In actual fact, the idea (adapted from the ChiefDelphi rules quoted previously) that breaking the encryption represents stealing copyrighted material is kind of specious. There's a fairly complicated and nuanced legal argument to be had, but the basics are that you can't steal what you already possess lawfully,³ and that even if circumvention of effective technical protection measures can be a DMCA violation, it's distinct from stealing.

Despite this, it's nice to be nice to the people running the forum, even if (in that one case) their wishes are kind of unreasonable and unfounded.

¹ Assuming FIRST doesn't do anything foolish like make the password an anagram of the game hint. (They won't do that again, at least until institutional memory of why they don't do that anymore has faded.)
²From a slightly bigger perspective, what's the net result of you trying (and of course failing)? You know more about breaking encryption—maybe you'll use that skill for good or evil later in life. We spend more time discussing your moral failings—now we've used time and resources that could have been otherwise allocated. We can propose all sorts of possible consequences, but I think it's fair to say that the impact of your actions in this case would be minimally negative, if at all.
³ For example: someone provides you with a locked box. (There is no key provided.) You decide you want it, and take it home. They can't say you stole the box, nor can they say you're trying to steal the contents of the box by prying the lock open. But if the box contains the FIRST game rules, then the copyright to those rules remains with the author, even though you own the container and the physical media on which the rules are printed.