*BSD News Article 67867


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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
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References: <NELSON.96Apr15010553@ns.crynwr.com> <31866E12.67FD83BE@lambert.org> <4m8k99$o12@master.di.fc.ul.pt> <318978E8.14B8@vfr.interceptor.com>
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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