Explicit prohibitions against reverse engineering in ToS and licenses, as is the case here, supersede the DMCA exception as per Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2003)[0]
> The European Digital Markets Act, which will require chat networks to provide interoperability
Only for ones that are big enough to meet a threshold, which iMessage does not. If it did it would only be enforceable in the EU, so that wouldn’t affect US users.
> There is a whole ecosystem of products built on this premise. Quicken, for example, relies on a library of reverse engineered banking interfaces to automate interaction and data aggregation of one's accounts.
The big difference with your example and this case is that in your example it leads to a new product that is sold, whereas in this case it’s the repackaging of someone else’s product, which is then subsequently sold and relies on someone else’s infrastructure.
Note that Apple hasn’t sued Beeper (yet) for reselling/sub-licensing iMessage, instead they’ve tightened access of their infrastructure.
It goes without saying that even if you’d believe that the DMCA reverse engineering exception allows for repackaging and resale of the reverse engineered product (which it doesn’t), it certainly doesn’t come with entitlement to the resources of owner of the reverse engineered product.
> Search and LLM products are also built on the consumption of other people's data and then charging for it.
Ignoring the fact that the adjudication on the legality of this has yet to be resolved for a second, this is still not analogous to the situation at hand.
Consumption of other people’s data to produce, generally, new data in new forms and context is not the same as repackaging and reselling. It’d be different if Beeper used their reverse engineering to setup their own competing chat network, although then you get into the territory of clean rooms etc.
0: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
