Laws will vary worldwide. For the US I believe the DMCA makes circumvention a crime. This was why the DeCSS number was illegal.
There may be b2b contracts in addition to what the law says, but I believe the DMCA has an interoperability exception. I'm curious if "getting it to run on new hardware" is enough for that to trigger.
What about defining the equipment as "repairably broken" and asserting that circumventing the license protection falls within right to repair?
*Opens even bigger can of worms*
What about invoking this in a situation where someone's using an older piece of equipment and does not want to pay for example $500k, $1m, or more to green-field replace an entire installation when 99% of the existing system has perhaps a decade or more life left in it?
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I'm not entirely read up on the finer points of the John Deere tractor situation (which is kind of the current poster child for this whole thing), but I actually think the above arguments actually resonate with the precedent set by this particular case.
I did try to search for John Deere to remind myself before posting because I wanted to draw that link, but the best I could find was that farmers were installing software from Russia (where it's widely available, unlike the US) to enable repairs. The articles didn't say this was illegal (which makes sense under my limited understanding of the DMCA), but did mention it'd break warranty under current rules.
It's a violation unless you have rights to use the work. This was added after the first revision, probably because they were worried about a challenge to the DMCA on these grounds striking more of the law's text.
So, below, you have people wondering about cracking machine equipment. Totally legal to do.
There may be b2b contracts in addition to what the law says, but I believe the DMCA has an interoperability exception. I'm curious if "getting it to run on new hardware" is enough for that to trigger.