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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!serv.hinet.net!nctuccca.edu.tw!howland.reston.ans.net!nntp.coast.net!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in2.uu.net!nwnews.wa.com!news1.halcyon.com!coho!tzs From: tzs@coho.halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX) Date: 7 May 1996 03:51:47 GMT Organization: Northwest Nexus, Inc. - Professional Internet Services Lines: 35 Message-ID: <4mmhcj$dfr@news1.halcyon.com> References: <NELSON.96Apr15010553@ns.crynwr.com> <31866E12.67FD83BE@lambert.org> <4m8k99$o12@master.di.fc.ul.pt> <318978E8.14B8@vfr.interceptor.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: coho.halcyon.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:23232 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:934 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3677 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3522 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:18880 comp.os.linux.advocacy:48351 Thumper! <thumper@vfr.interceptor.com> wrote: >Even if you own the product, it is ILLEGAL for you to use that information to >engineer your own product, whether it be compatible or not (ie, using the >information to learn from is illegal as well). [I'm assuming United States law in this posting] In general, this is incorrect. If you don't want someone to be able to legally reverse engineer your product, you've got to get them to contractually agree to not reverse engineer it. For non-software products, there is not much you can do to stop reverse engineering, except get patents to cover the essentials of your product, or make sure that you are careful who you sell to. If it's going to be a mass marketed product that any schmoe can go and buy at the supermarket or hardware store, patents are about the only protection you can hope for. On the other hand, even though reverse engineering is legal, one is not allowed to use illegal means to do the reverse engineering. This is where reverse engineering of sofware runs into problems. It is almost impossible to reverse engineer software without making copies of that software, in which case you are likely to run afoul of the copyright laws. Copyright is not as big of a problem as you might imagine, though, because the courts are careful to try to limit copyright protection to those areas that it is intended for. Copyright was not intended to provide patent-like protection, and if some copying is necessary to discern how unprotected elements of a product function, there's a good chance that this will be allowed. The most famous case in this area would be the _Sega_ case, in which defendant made copies of Sega's ROMs and annotated them, in order to understand the interfaces necessary in order to make compatible game cartridges. Defendant won, because that copying was the only practical way to get at the unprotected interface. --Tim Smith