Post
by bonehand » Sat Apr 03, 2004 12:53 pm
Actually, reverse engineering computer software is is one of those quasi-legal areas. Unless something changed since I last did a paper on it, reverse enginnering computer software has been one of the ways that a competitor could adopt technologies that are compatible with the existing software. A good example is Microsoft's Windows operating systems. MS has not been willing to share internal specifics with certain developers in the past and in litigation MS has claimed intellectual property rights as the reasoning behind it. However, certain laws still do apply in copying someone else's work, that was not their intention, so courts have allowed defendants the right to reverse engineer Windows so that they could access what MS refered to as their trade secrets and patented software so that the defendant's software worked properly. This gave MS the protection they wanted, but also made it so that the defendants were within their legal boundaries also.
Reverse engineering to copy someone elses work is fully against the law though, but that opens another whole grey area because a copy might work in every way but be programmed in a completely different way! Depending on how the orignal company patented the work, their patents may not apply if different means arrive at the same end! Huge lawsuits in the 80's and 90's between the console and PC game manufacturers led to an adoption of some of the first serious copy protection schemes integrated into the actual systems and the courts never fully agreed with one party or the other.
It is a very grey area in law, and much of this type of litigation is still untested, but reverse engineering is only against the EULA which we don't read, and only is an agreement between the individual and the company.