Mad Tooey's Site

I was recently using Putty an open source SSH client software and I noticed a notice I had not seen before.

LEGAL WARNING: Use of PuTTY, PSCP, PSFTP and Plink is illegal in countries where encryption is outlawed. I believe it is legal to use PuTTY, PSCP, PSFTP and Plink in England and Wales and in many other countries, but I am not a lawyer and so if in doubt you should seek legal advice before downloading it. You may find this site useful (it's a survey of cryptography laws in many countries) but I can't vouch for its correctness.

Now this got me interested so I started looking into it more and found more and more worrying information. As I'm a UK Citizen my first country to read more into was the UK I found that it is legal to use encryption within the UK but you have to apron request be able to decrypt the information. That's not really an issue because they have to get a warrant to be able to ask you to do this and if they can do that they can take your PC that has the information on it anyway.

So anyway back to my dilemma for TooGaming we are going to be international trade with countries such as India and the middle-east since it seems that these countries tend to big players of the older DirectX play games. Now looking into it I found an interesting issue under the Wassenaar Arrangement there are restrictions on distributing crypto information within certain countries.

So when writing software that you are going to distribute you not only have to worry about tax, trading law you also have to go onto encryption law I am not sure what other issues there are to be looked into but I doubt this will be the last red tape that makes me go .