I mostly just meant you wouldn't be breaking laws technically to go around them via reverse engineering. To your second statement that's actually a good point, it could be. I mean in general overall it's going to be pretty outrageous to try and legitimately develop going around apple entirely, so the OP's point is valid de facto, just saying in principle they can't lock people out in the absolute sense under current law.

> I mostly just meant you wouldn't be breaking laws technically to go around them via reverse engineering.

Considering that their terms of service explicitly prohibits this, I'd say that it's illegal. Will Apple go after you if you do it? Probably not.

First, violating terms of service isn't illegal - ToS isn't the law, it's a contract; breaching contract terms isn't illegal but may expose you to some liabilities depending on the contract.

Second, terms of service don't always apply, you may refuse them, and then you're not even in breach of contract. Things like shrink-wrap/click-through EULAs aren't binding contracts in Norway; so the default provisions of copyright law apply, which allows reverse engineering without the permission of the copyright holder.

> Wouldn't using their software without a license also be illegal?

Which law?

Copying software without permission might be illegal - loading it from disk into memory isn't counted as copying btw - but running the software?

If there's any copy-protection, you'd need to circumvent it, so plausibly the DMCA.