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Obfuscated Circuitry?
ortholattice writes "The current issue of EDN
has an article
Cunning circuits confound crooks
that discusses methods that attempt to foil the viewing of software
in embedded designs. Interesting is its view on reverse-engineering,
which the article consistently calls
theft:
"As programmable logic increasingly encroaches on high-volume territory
formerly dominated by ASICs, unscrupulous operators are licking their
lips at the prospects of easily duplicated, or even reverse-engineered,
designs."
"...The other harder but possibly even more damaging form of theft
is 'reverse-engineering'...""
I remember when the original VideoCypher system for TVRO (satellite TV) came out. The codes were held in battery-backed RAM. You could not loose power or you lost the code. The guys who hacked it actually drilled tiny holes in the chips, added a drop of mercury, then used the mercury as a conductor path to connect logic analyizers. They would read the outputs from the pins and compare them to what was going on in the chip and wound up cracking the DES encryption. Cpt_Kirks
Making a key for the cable/DSS descrambler that lets you steal content that is not yours is not the same as making the key to your house which you access only your own contents. I agree with the DECSS concept, because you did legaly buy regardless of where the copy was purchased (legal not bootleg) access to the content and fair use laws apply. When you buy a lock (DVD) and key (player) than making an extra key should not be illegal!
The truth shall set you free!
I've worked with embedded systems since the early 80's. You can obfuscate stuff all you want, but it will not stop someone that really wants to copy something from doing it. All you can do is make it a little harder for them to do. In the end if they REALLY want the information they can get it.
As for legality it all depends on what they do exactly and where.
If they grab your copyrighted 'code' and just clone it, then that is a copyright violation in many countries.
If they reverse engineer your system by examining the i/o patterns, then it might by a violation in some countries, not many at this point.
Either way if you are going to try and rely on obscrutity to protect your market share, you will be in for a very rude awakening.
I certainly wasn't arguing that you shouldn't try to take steps to protect your trade secrets. On the contrary! If you as an individual or an organization have trade secret design information, you should take every legitimate technical effort to protect its secrecy.
Know, however, that once you release a product containing that trade secret, it is unprotected, and you have only those defenses that you implemented to protect your trade secret. Knowing that just about anything can and will be reverse engineered, patent protection is the better option, of course.
My entire point was simply that reverse engineering is not theft, particularly in the context of trade secrets. (As an aside, reverse engineering of a patented device can, in some circumstances, be actionable). It is the legitimate pursuit of understanding of the operation of a product.
No, really! I'm one of the *good* lawyers!
"Reverse Engineering" didn't create PC clones. All of the cloning companies simply created a processor that followed the same (freely published) instruction set and rough timings, so that the software still worked. The underlying hardware is irrelevant as long as the interface is the same.
Yeah, typically, but there was a mix up with Amish Paradise, and he didn't in fact have permission, but Coolio had no legal recourse.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Pretty bad picture, isn't it?
Brian Dipert
I also wish people would learn the lesson you seem to take to heart so vigorously: There is no tamper-proof hardware, and technical fixes to legal problems rarely stick.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Whoa, big breach in logic. You nearly blew my mind with that last sentence, it made so little sense.
The author didn't say that all people who reverse engineer are criminals. He said that there is an aspect of design theft called reverse-engineering, and that he was going to concentrate on how to prevent it.
Whether or not they are entitled to not be the victim of this is not the point. Because in some eyes they are entitled to it, and in some eyes they are not. This article, obviously, has no use in a IP-free world, so therefore the target audience is not likely IP-free proponents. The target audience are corporations interested in protecting their investment, and that target audience has most likely decided that they ARE entitled to not be the victim of this sort of theft.
I think that everyone here would agree that you shouldn't use someone's code without giving them credit, that's just fair. Why would you expect it to be any different with firmware?
________________
They're - They are
Their - Belonging to them
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
In what sense is this copyright violation? I'm not a lawyer, but copyright isn't the applicable protection here. Patenting might be, and if the implementation is patented, then reverse-engineering for purposes of introducing a rival product would be illegal (and unnecessary, since if it were patented, the details would have to be disclosed as part of the patent process). However, if it is not patented, then it would be considered a trade secret which is not protected against reverse engineering. As someone else has pointed out, if I open up the hood of my car and figure out how it works and build another car, there is no legal recourse against me unless something in there is patented. Whether or not it is patentable is a separate question.
I did not say that no changes or updates would have been made; I said that the "modern version" of Photoshop would not have been created. It may be that *some* newer version of Photoshop would have been created, but the feature-rich (and expensive to develop) "modern version" of Photoshop would have been unnecessary without the pressure of competition. Instead of the incredibly powerful image editing tool we have now, we would instead have a tool only powerful enough to maintain profitability in the face of the (very real) factors you mention. Surely you don't mean to suggest that lack of competition fosters innovation?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I saw a special on how it was done ( or the special covered it). One person sat down and figured what did what and wrote it down. The person then closed the book, and the person then handed it off to another person to implement. I thought it was pretty cool becuase there was two people involved IBM lost.
Another point we would be in trouble form other counties when we tried to reverse engineer their technology. They could just sue us. THat would have put a damper on some of the cold war. I can see the headlines now. "Russia sues U.S. over copyright infringement!"
All this stuff against reverse engineer is scaring me. It will hold be technology. The simplest case being the cost of the product would go down when you have clones. THe IBM PC is an example of that. Now, how far would we be if the price wouldn't have gone down on PCs? Would we even have Linux? Or would we still be doing timesharing on major computers?
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Parodies like Weird Al are an obvious example.
Except that he gets permission from everyone he parodies. He probably doesn't have to, but he does.
--------
Or, at least, it helps demonstrate that something was reverse engineered, rather than simply copied. If I have no chance of following the wires and such, but I can still replicate the device, I must have treated it as a black box, and I thus escape copyright. It's easy to show your version to be a clean-room implementation if there's no way you can get yourself contaminated.
One, Hemos just okayed the writeup someone else submitted to the queue. He didn't add any comments to it, except the "dept" tag and possibly the title.
Two, Hemos' job can be stated as publishing stories on the front page that will generate lots of page visits. To troll, in the fishing sense, is to put bait out that will generate lots of bites on the hook. Thus, Hemos is a troll, but that's his job.
If you don't want to be baited, don't go somewhere that constantly and loudly claims to have nothing to do with professional journalism. They intend to get people to talk, even if it's on a gut-reaction level, as that is what pays the rent.
[
One problem there - actual reverse engineering - cycling through all possible inputs and recording the outputs, then creating a clean-room implementation that gives the same outputs - is NOT theft (unless the new implementation infringes on someones patent - which has nothing to do with the reverse engineering process).
To put it plainly - there is no such thing as "full out felonious theft", all theft is unlawfull - reverse engineering is not unlawfull - therefore reverse engineering is NOT theft.
-Nick
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
Modern versions of Photoshop would never have been created if Adobe did not know for a fact that there were others out there attempting to produce a better product with similar capabilities. Imagine Adobe had patented the use of a computer for the retouching of photos. Why waste money on development when you have a monopoly? Fire the programmers and let the public complain about missing features all they want; anyone who produced a competing product could be sued out of existence.
It is the competition between the Adobes and Corels, the Intels and the AMDs, that has driven the fantastic pace of innovation these last 40 or so years. Allow every single invention bullet-proof protection from competition and you will see the pace of change slow to a crawl.
[tinfoil]And the worst part of this is, when the economy goes south because of this, the rich will just get richer. Sometimes I think they're driving the economy into the ground on purpose.[/tinfoil]
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. There's a difference between fair use and making money from a product. In the original article the idea was of reverse enginnering and making money from that. That's illegal, as it should be. But reverse engineering and never making money, or reverse engineering with permission is a totally different matter.
I believe in self-flagellation. In fact, everybody should have a flagellum.
TiVo uses blowfish (or two-fish... some sort of fish!) decryption (and keys) in the hardware. It downloads updates, and then decrypts them in hardware (ASIC). It may run Linux, but some of it isn't open-source (some of the hardware definitely isn't!).
Is this evil? I don't think so. They need to protect their $10/month service from theft somehow. Hey, TiVo is a good idea. I'll pay the monthly.
--phil
No, that's defined as infringement of a copyright monopoly.
MUST be stolen! Someone call the authorities!
You have a "monopoly" on your name and identity. Since you're obviously against all forms of monopolies, how about I borrow your identity and then, oh, buy $50 million of banannas.
There are *SOME* times when a monopoly is a Good Thing. Trade Sectrets are like Patents, but you've got to make an effort to protect them... which I guess includes everything legal you can do.
Nope - the compatibles companies simply created their own processor that used the same instruction set and interface, which were freely published (so people could write software). The underlying hardware circuits (which is what this reverse-engineering article is all about) were not copied.
That is legally defined as theft.
No, it is not.
In the case of copyright infringement, making money off of somebody else's copyrighted work is legally defined as copyright infringement, and is explicitly (and with good reason) not equated to theft.
Making money by reverse engineering a product was never, before the DMCA, defined as copyright infringement, and most certainly not theft.
Now we have the DMCA, and the dawning of an age of verticle monopolies enforced at the end of a government gun the likes of which we haven't seen before. Why. Because the only damn way anything is going to interoperate in the future is going to be via controlled, licensed standards, which will always put competitors at a disadvantage and, probably quite quickly, lead to their demise.
The DMCA pays lipservice to "interoperability," but only as a sole purpose, and as any engineer will tell you, very little if anything on this planet can ever be said to have a "sole" purpose -- applications for products are always found which suprise the original maker. As the courts have said "interoperability" as merely one of several possible applications does not suffice to fall under the "interoperability" exclusion of the DMCA, this effectively means no reverse engineering at all, even for interoperability. End of story.
Fools like you will continue to scream "theft" where no such thing exists, and the even greater fools who run our government will probably listen. And thus ends the age of exponential growth in knowledge and technology, not with a bang, but with a wimper beneath the authoritarian thumb spawned of the greed of own corporate industry and the government which whored itself out to them, and the myopic short sightedness of folks like you.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Your not liking (and the implied desire to stop) one sided views is actually a one sided view.
Point of view is a major component of what makes individuals unique.
...it was a neat idea.
But now, well, multilayer circuit boards are common and anyone looking at a PC board would expect that. X-rays anyone?
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Yep that was it (the 1999 article) for some reason I thought I saw it much longer ago ;)
thanks for the great reference !
-- the cake is a lie
This surprises me, do you have any examples ? After all, if I look at a map, I expect it to be *accurate* and not to contain bogus information.
;)
Unless of course they stick these nonexistant features in quasi-unpopulated areas
-- the cake is a lie
In this excellent file, if you search for "OBFUSCATION", you can see a discussion of how Apple II programmers were making false assembly code to fool crackers.
help finding things on the Internet try www.yahoo.com
Having this in my hands, I'm now a bit more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, though I would like to see him post a clarification on the site.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
And thus the real damage of the DeCSS case takes hold. Now, the act of studying things to find out how they work (reverse engineering) is redefined as "theft".
For example look for small alleys in city maps that don't really exist - there's a technical term for these that I forget ....
Reverse-engineering is not theft, however reverse-engineering can be used to commit theft. Firing a handgun is not murder, but point that handgun at a person and do the same thing and circumstances have changed to something less than legal.
In the same way that not all reverse-engineering is theft, not all reverse-engineering is not theft.
I would rather companies that are intent on keeping their technology secret make it harder (physically) to extract rather than resorting to legal tactics. I personally believe that everyone has the right to reverse engineer anything they want to, but nobody said that the company creating the product has to make it easy.
There is a drawback though. The more complex the circutry becomes, the harder it will be to debug problems in the circuits and this will lead to longer production cycles which will give the feared competition a leg up anyways. Always a tradeoff.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The difference, of course is that ideas are not copyrightable. Nor are they patentable. So your situation is ridiculous, but has no bearing at all on reverse engineering of software.
Back when Dos was what everyone used you needed to publish how your hardware works.
Drivers were provide in the appications so EVER app coder needed access to your hardware specs or he couldn't write a driver into his apps.
Now hardware venders can just make a driver for Windows.
This means no specs...
This will eventually backfire..
While hardware venders make drivers for the tripple threat of MacOs, Windows and Linux they don't bother with BSD or BeOs or anyone other than the main three.
Hardware makers will find that BSD and Solarus do not bother to reverse engenear anything and if you want to sell hardware to a wide audence you MUST provide specs or you will only be supported by those you support directly.
So eventually I'd say addatudes like this will eventually bite them on the bumm...
I don't actually exist.
2) DirectX technologies are either patented by MS or licensed (circumventing this MIGHT be possible, reverse engineer them, find a different way to do the same exact thing)
3) The Windows task bar is patented (yeah, I know...)
4) The registry and the manner it is modified, protected, installed, etc is patented
5) Crashing to an unusable state is patented (Microsoft made sure to get that one)
You get the point.
Burn Hollywood Burn
DirecTV receivers contain a smartcard which serves as an authentication token to the receiver. The smartcard can be reprogrammed via a datastream in the satellite's signal. Once you've successfully pointed your dish, you call up DirecTV and tell them the number on your smartcard. They in turn send a signal in the satellite's datastream that activates the card.
DirecTV is currently transitioning from its second ("H") to its third ("HU") generation of smartcards. (The first ("F") generation was cracked and phased out long ago.)
Cracks exist for the H cards, but here's the catch: Nobody's ever cracked the ASIC on the H card. The best anybody's been able to do is figure out how to reprogram the firmware in the H card to harness its ASIC for their own nefarious purposes. H card emulators exist, but even they need an actual, physical H card plugged into them.
Why bother with an emulator, then? Good question. DirecTV buys and analyzes pirated H cards and devises ways to reprogram them via their satellite data stream in such a way as to disable them but leave legit users untouched. These electronic countermeasures ("ECMs") can reprogram the card into an irreparable infinite loop, whereas an emulator can just be terminated and reprogrammed once a counter-countermeasure is devised.
In the near-to-mid term, DirecTV will send HU cards to all of its subscribers, and then make the H cards cease to function. As far as I've been able to find out, no cracks at all exist yet for HU cards.
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
reverse engineering deemed by the supreme court as fair use? The fact that a news organization would post an article like this calling people criminals is well, criminal. Somebody needs to send a clearn message to these news agencies telling them that we wont stand by as they push the big biz agenda.
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
In the early '90s Mackie released a series of mixing boards that were unsurpassed at the time in terms of quality of design vs. price. Not too long after they released a design of 8-buss mixers, Berringer, a German company that, prior to this point, had not had a single mixer that I am aware of in their product line, released their own 8-buss mixers. The Berrnger design was nearly identical in circuitry to the Mackie design, and sold for substantially less.
In a case such as this I can easily see how the company whose product was reverse-engineered would be upset, and consider such reverse-engineering to be theft.
What the author mentions only slightly and then skirts as "theft" , is that in reverse engineering, the product is often improved. Holding someone back from looking at the original design and then improving on it is a sure path to stagnation. This just goes back to the whole "open source" arguement.
There's no copyright on existentialism. You can't copyright an idea.
You can copyright a particular expression of an idea. The copyright on Sartre's works, for example, may still be in effect. But the copyright applies only to the particular words Sartre used to express existentialism, not to existentialism itself.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Lets give this guy a call, shall we?
Let these writers know that one sided views are not cool
Author Information
Contact Technical Editor Brian Dipert at 1-916-454-5242, fax 1-530-937-8147, e-mail bdipert@pacbell.net
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
What do you think would happen if someone created a fully-functional Windows clone? Something that looked almost exactly the same, minus the logo and the name, something that had the stability of Linux and the same UI, binary format, layout, etc, of Windows...?
This should be completely legal, but $10 says Microsoft would go after it. And that's just dumb.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
Try Visual Basic. (Or Forth.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Why shouldn't i be able to reverse engineer someone else's product, figure out how it works and then build a better one?
Maybe our cars should all come with wheel covers to prevent us from finding out what makes them roll so easily.
Some parellels have been drawns to DeCSS; reverse engineering in order to gain access to what we have a legal right to under fair use, for personal use. There's a big difference ethically and legally.
Yes, the writer of the article throws around some terms a little too freely, but I don't think it's a big deal taken in context.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Yes, "Battlefield Earth". Read the novel and found it perhaps the silliest, most completely corny novel I've ever read, with the possible exception of the maybe two or three Piers Anthony books I've tried.
If you're in the mood for ca. 1000 (IIRC) pages of, IMHO, very exuberant silliness (Sonic stunners, hordes of Scottish engineers, aliens that relish eating Earth trees by the grove, man-portable world-destroying bombs, a primitive protagonist who liberates the dozen universes...), it's a decent read. Just don't expect to find, oh, science in it.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
If you want to have examples of obfuscated circuitry, you only have to look at satellite smart cards.
I don't know about the situation here in North America, but while I was living in Europe the piracy of the cards was rampant, and I've read several articles that explained how satellite companies were trying to prevent people from reverse engineering their card.
I wish I could find the article online (it was on a magazine), it was a very interesting read, since these cards have a significant amount of logic, for example, whose purpose is just to foil any possible reverse engineering: and I am talking *hardware* reverse engineering, and no, just covering everything up in tar won't be enough with the current investigative tools...
-- the cake is a lie
Lemme get this straight...If it weren't for reverse engineering there would be no windows? Hang the bastards I say :)
Phear my l33t homepage.
No wonder I'm always lost.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
As for reverse engineering being theft: it is
No. Theft is Theft. If I simply copied a design then that could be called theft.
If I figured out how the design works and then created my own design to emulate the original, that is not theft. That is reverse engineering.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Unfortunatly, the publishers of EDN (and ED and others) have very much taken this "ethic" to heart.
This stems from the basic hi-tech business problem: you are either a monopoly provider or a commodity provider.
This is a variation on the age old software how-to-avoid-piracy problem.
And the problems of detecting and prosecuting patent and trade secret violations are legion.
So the response is an unjustifiable attack on reverse engineering. Expect to see the DCMA applied much, much more broadly in the next few years.
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
I, personally, enjoyed your article, and found it very informative. It's unfortunate that so much energy was expended by the zealots who do not understand the value of your work.
I've been looking into these issues myself, in order to protect my own designs, and was REALLY hoping for some intelligent conversation about the merits of various techniques, and other ideas. Instead, I heard only people screaming at how wrong it was to hide this information. OK, then, folks, I'd like to please have the contents of your inbox. Nothing to hide?
Is ANYONE on this board interested in discussing the technical feasibility and merits of protecting design IP? I sure am.
To start: I'm dealing with SRAM-based (cheap) FPGAs and DSPs all the time, and it's very difficult to protect the software from reverse-engineering. The best I can do, I find, is to encrypt the code on the ROM, then use a PIC to decode it on the fly to the processor (or FPGA). If the traces to the processor are buried, it is difficult to retrieve the code.
The free-ip.com solution won't work, because it's trivial to program a device to mimic the LFSR (just store and replay the sequence!). The remedy proposed was to use a very long sequence, so it's impractical in RAM. Fine, but then you'd need to wait a LONG time to cycle through those steps. Any other ideas?
- HEbGb
Suppose you spend $50m on making a discovery. The device to make use of this costs $5 to make, and saves everyone in the US $20. As soon as you start to manufacture them (for $15) along comes a cloning company and sells them for $6. The problem is, if you knew this was going to happen, why would you spend the $50m? Now imagine that is is a drug, for example, which won't get made without that much investment, and you get some idea of why patent protection is a good idea.
A patent affords the ultimate protection, I agree, but how on EARTH can you possibly argue that people don't have the right to make reverse-engineering difficult?
Patent battles, when they can be waged, are very expensive. While this is, of course, where you make your living, the rest of us aren't thrilled by this notion.
The author may have been loose when defining what 'theft' really was - people do steal designs outright, but face it - we have the right to protect our designs and make barriers to reverse-engineering. Otherwise, why not let the world look at all of your blueprints and files? It's patented, right?
We have every right (and responsibility to our employer) to take reasonable precautions against reverse-engineering. The article simply outlined various methods. I found it very informative.
As for adding protection against reverse-engineering it simply commits too much cash to the design to make it worth-while.
If your invention is patented, there's no need for anyone to reverse engineer it. Part of the requirement of a patent is that you describe in detail how to make your invention.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Look at all the great lenghts that these people go to, in order to prevent the "stealing" of their "intellectual property"! So, in essence, these corporations admit to making money by withholding vital information from the very people that they claim to serve.
The whole idea of "intellectual property" is slavery. Those who hold the "secret" information are the masters of those who are ignorant. Withholding information, no matter what it may be, is a dangerous precedent for society. Who decides what information should be secret? What if a cure for cancer has already been discovered, yet drug companies want to withhold that information from humanity in order to continue making huge profits on existing expensive cancer treatments?
So what if people can "steal" your idea, and sell different versions of your product? That's the whole idea behind competition! Your efforts have opened up a whole new market niche, aren't you proud of that? "Trade secrets" and "Intellectual Property" are, in fact, ANTI-competitive. They limit the competition to exactly zero. Sounds more like Communism that capitalism to me, only the State has been replaced by the Corporations. Not much difference.
It is time to TAKE BACK THE KNOWLEDGE! LEARN everything you possibly can, whether you're "supposed" to or not. USE that knowledge, and COMPETE with others, thus raising the bar of standards and IMPROVING HUMANITY!
The free flow of ALL information is essential. No more secrets!
Way back in 1981, I almost took a job operating a tool affectionately known as "IMMA" for a largish electronics company in Dallas. There were only 12 of these machines ever made (6 of em were in Japan) and they were for "failure analysis".
You could pry the lid off a chip, mount it in this machine, peel off the atoms one layer at a time and it would tell you what the impurities were in each little patch of silicon. The output was a 3D plot of the part in dopants. You could determine process failures or derive the design.
That was almost 20 years ago -- they must have better stuff by now.
I understand I'm a bit 'popular' on slashdot.org today ;-) I'll say publicly what I've said privately to everyone who's written me so far; although I admit that I didn't explicitly state this, what I meant was reverse-engineering with intent to illegally re-use IP protected by copyright and/or patent. I even mention legal reverse engineering when I brought up Integrated Circuit Engineering....
;-)
It appears from some of the earlier-made postings I've just scanned that some of you figured this out already. I thank you for defending me. And for those who I confused with my less-than-exact wording, I apologize. Profusely. Now quit clogging my email inbox!
I'll be publishing a print clarification of this point in an upcoming issue of EDN.
Regards,
Brian Dipert
"To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen."
--The Amtal Rule
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
It looks like he's calling it illegal to me:
The other harder but possibly even more damaging form of theft is "reverse-engineering." In that scenario, someone uses the information stored in the programmable-logic device to reconstruct the original circuit details and then alters and incorporates those details in part or whole into other designs.
Here he has called something that looks like bios copying reverse engineering. This is a miss use of terms. We can ignore a discussion on the history of bios copyrights and all that because, later he says what he really means:
The classic method of reverse-engineering a programmable-logic design involves cycling through all possible device input combinations and capturing the corresponding output bit patterns. By using essentially a huge Karnaugh map (often with high-powered computer help) or through visual inspection of data patterns, a thief can derive the Boolean equations that define the internal logic.
This really is reverse engineering and he is calling it theft and thereby implying it's illegal! The "thief" in this case can be doing anything from playing with furby to petting a real cat to learn about it. If the "thief" then tries to duplicate what he sees, he has commited, horrors, design theft. BZZZZZZZZZT!
He deserves a stomping for being both greedy and wrong. People who follow his design philosopy will produce Byzantine junk: overly complex, deceptive, and functionaly suboptimal. In the end his toys will be much less useful and equally less desirable. He will be burried by any competitor that produces straight forward products that replicate useful functionality. He can cry illegal all he wants, buy Compaq and others have proved him wrong.
The author doesn't call reverse-engineering theft. He says that in this type of theft that he is reporting on, one of the more sinister versions of it is reverse engineering. The author is writing an article about preventing design theft. And he isn't really talking about theft in the legal sense, although he does bring it up. He talks about keeping people from snaking your work, regardless of whether you have a legal right to protect it (i.e. copyrights, patents, trade secrets, etc).
Does he flat out say that reverse-engineering is illegal? No! In addition, all of his examples involve theoretical rival companies, not an evil band of OSS zealots.
From what I read, the author's view is that reverse-engineering is a tool that can be used to commit IP theft, and here are some ways to prevent it.
Sure, you can use my identity and by $50 million i bananas, I don't mind that, but you'll pay for them.
I am an individual, not a company. Companies and individuals have different rights. If someone creates something, other people should have the right to study it and create something like it based on their findings.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
About 20 years ago, a friend of my Dad's made a couple of million dollars selling specialized hardware devices to accupuncture quacks^Wdoctors. Most of these devices were dead simple electronically, and this guy approached my Dad to get some ideas on how to make the guts all fall to pieces if anybody tried to take the box apart. Mostly he did it with fake circuits and real ones expoxied to one surface of the box wired to other fake circuits or real ones on other surfaces of the box so that if you took the box apart, both the fake circuits and the real ones would have wires rip out, making it harder to see which circuits were real.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Any of you lawyer types, feel free to correct this - but from what I understand, there are no legal protections for a trade secret. However, there are legal protections for a person or company that decides to disclose a trade secret to another person or company, if they identify it as a trade secret.
In other words - if they tell you what the trade secret is, and that it is a trade secret, they they can hold you accountable if you disclose it to someone else without their permission. If you lie or comit breach of contract in order to gain the secret, then you're right - that's essentially theft; but then again, there's no reverse engineering involved there. If they never tell you what the trade secret is, and you discover it on your own, then it's game over - their secret is no longer a secret, and you have every right to make use of it.
There's a tradeoff here - if a company gets a patent on an invention, process, or what have you, then they have a legal monopoly on it for a few dozen years in return for disclosing their secret. If they don't get a patent, then they can keep their secret as long as nobody discovers it, which might be a good long time (for example, Coke) or might not last more than a few years.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Although most slashdotters won't agree with me on this point, I'd be totally happy if I found out one of my competitors was stealing my design. Because I have a butt-load of patents protecting it, and if my competitor wants to sell his product in any major market, I'm going to sue his ass into the ground.
As for adding protection against reverse-engineering it simply commits too much cash to the design to make it worth-while.
Preventing someone from stealing your designs, is like any other type of theft, no matter what you do, a determined thief will still be able to steal it.
Besides his prevention method only discusses a black box type look at things. What if its a professional reverse engineering company like Semiconductor Insights decides to reverse engineer it. They are going to take the chip, de-cap it, and reverse engineer the circuitry right off the silicon. What exactly can you do to stop that?
Anyway, basically this guy is selling a new lock, and what what you should be doing is buying theft insurance (i.e. patents).
Get real. I haven't been able to gain karma since the cap was put in, and I've already lost a point on this one. Serves me right for being such a karma whore :-)
This may sound shocking, but I don't care about the trade secrets of a company where I don't work. I never signed a non disclosure agreement with the company, so I never agreed not to disclose trade secrets.
Patents are designed to give the company a limited monopoly in exchange for them providing the rest of humanity with the information on how that device or procedure works... This is considered _good_ by most because it prevents knowledge from being lost.
However, a company has _no_ such protection for information that they don't share with humanity. Companies who wish to keep their information away from everyone employ a tactic know as trade secrets. This means that they try to keep information secret so that others can't do what they can do.
However this tactic has one serious drawback, other people can learn your secrets through looking at your products, or by simply watching your procedures... Then those other people can compete against you with your own information... We can't have that now!
If something isn't protected by a patent, it is fair game to be reverse engineered and that information used against them in a competetive market... If they feel like sharing then our society will reward them with a 17 year monopoly. Their choice...
Only the whiners go crying to court when their secrets become public knowledge... As if the court can somehow make everyone forget the truth... *laughs* No court is _that_ powerful.
-- Never make a general statement.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
I don't believe reverse engineering of anything is illegal, unless (1) the target being reverse engineered is (or can be defined as) a technological measure for the protection of copyrighted material and (2) the reverse engineering has purposes other than interoperability. If you find *any* evidence that reverse engineering (outside of the situations addressed by the DMCA) is illegal in the US, please post it here.
Your statement seems to be derived from a "that sounds wrong" basis and not from any legitimate source. (Of course, if you happen to be the one person who decides what is and what is not illegal, I beg your forgiveness!) It's a lot like all the people that keep saying that DigitalConvergence has a reason to complain about the theft of their "IP". No one can categorize the "IP" being stolen from DC as either (a) copyright work, (b) trademarks, or (c) patented technique. If what is being "stolen" from DC is Intellectual Property at all, it is a trade secret, and therefore not protected from reverse engineering.
I applaud your desire to see the original inventors get paid, but to outlaw reverse engineering in service of that goal would have too high a cost. Look through the comments on this story, and you will find many many many comments to the effect that Compaq's clean room reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS was the single most important event in the creation of the boom in personal computing. If you could turn back the clock, would you prevent them from making the PC affordable, in order to protect poor, starving IBM from evil, thieving Compaq?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
A couple of problems with #2
2. Unlimited reverse engineering aka "Perfect Reverse Engineering". All products may be disassembled and duplicated without hinderence of patent, trade secrecy, or any other form of intellectual property. Knowledge flow is instantaneous from creator to user.
That's exactly the way it works now. Even the disassembly and duplication of patented inventions is legal, so long as it is "for the mere
purpose of philosophical experimentation, or to ascertain the verity and exactness of the specification"
Trade secrecy laws do not protect against reverse engineering. Trade secrecy laws only protect against "insider jobs" -- where the trade secret is disclosed by someone who is contractually obligated to keep it secret.
The other applicable form of IP is copyright, and it is well established that you have the right to read copyrighted works, and thus, to understand them.
Outcome: The tragedy of the commons. Companies will play "wait-n-see" to see who comes up with difficult to engineer solutions to problems. If they are making a profit, they will not bother to spend money on R&D.
This is not what "tragedy of the commons" means. Tragedy of the commons only applies to depletable resources, like a silo full of corn. If everyone takes corn out of the silo, and no one refills it (or pays money which is then used to refill it), the silo will quickly empty out, and no one will have corn. IP is not a depletable resource, and the "tragedy of the commons" does not apply.
Copyrights and patents create incentives to publish, which is good, but also turn unlimited resources into limited, scarce resources at the same time, which is bad.
Here's hoping that we can remain civil, and arrive at solutions that provide a fair balance for each individual case.
Good patent and copyright laws maximize the amount of disclosure of inventions and publication of works, while at the same time minimize the tremendous accumulation of power that can result from granting a corporate monopoly over an unlimited resource. The fact that our media corporations, which are basically holding companies for copyrights on nearly all of the intellectual work of the 20th century, are quickly becoming the most powerful entities on the planet -- more powerful then even national governments, is a sign that the system is not fairly balanced.
Now that's a crook!
Sometimes code is used as a lock to protect content or access. This code key should be in a secure form. We all may know how the brass key counterpart works. I do not want anyone to "reverse engineer" the access device (door lock) to my house by cutting blanks till you hit the right combination of cuts. Knowing how it works and knowing the cut of my brass key are not related. Protecting the cut of the key is important in satelite TV, cable TV, Cell phone & related service industries. (theft of service) Knowing how a smart card works is one thing. Hacking a satalite card is another. Theft of service is still a crime in most locations.
The truth shall set you free!
As usual, someone else (jms) managed to make my point much more clearly in another post:
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
The bits that you can read from an FPGA, or EPROM constitute "the code" and as we all know, code is copyrightable whether it be source, object, or machine code.
/. consider to be reverse engineering. If you want to copy the internals of a device in order to sell a "clone" that is theft. There has been much discussion in the courts over "clean room" implementations of workalikes, just ask intel and AMD. Their court cases clarified what you can and cannot copy and resell, and what you must build yourself from scratch(without looking inside) long ago.
/. folks would generally regard as rev-eng. That's not what this article is about.
If you want to analyze the signals generated by a device in order to build something compatible, or to build a "workalike" that is what "we" at
if I open up the hood of my car and figure out how it works and build another car, there is no legal recourse against me unless something in there is patented
This is correct unless something is copyrighted or trademarked. For instance, you can't make a perfect copy of a Cadillac, including the trademarked name and hood ornament and then turn around, call it a Cadillac and sell it as such. Nor can you copy the owner's manual and sell it. It is afterall, a book. OTOH, you can look at a car, see how it rolls, its doors open and so on, then build something with 4 wheels, engine, seats, and so forth and call it a car, and sell them all day long.
Just as with a CD which contains copyrighted bit patterns that are essential for its proper operation, you can make a personal copy or replica for your own use, so long as that "use" does not include selling or giving the copy to someone else.
Taking something apart in order to find out how to connect to it is what the
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
If the circuit is copyrighted, then duplicating it and using it for your own use is infringement and illegal.
...
If the circuit uses patented elements, then using those same elements in your circuit is infringement and illegal.
If the circuit is only under trade-secret protections.. Well, if your secret ever gets discovered, you can do nothing to prevent widespread disclosure or use of it. (I assume that it isn't being disclosed in violation of a NDA contract.) If I found the secret recipe of coca cola in my cupboard tonight, I can start bottling my own drink. I can't call it coca-cola (trademark infringement), but I can bottle and sell it.
So, the question is: Is an FPGA circuit copyrighted or a trade secret? IANAL, but I would think that it would be trade secret. The company doesn't disclose the circuit to you, so why shouldn't it be uncopyrighted. If they disclosed it under copyright or patents, then they have a way to prevent you from copying it, or using ideas in it.
But, for anyone in the industry to think that you can send out millions of copies of a circuit, with no more than trade-secret protections, and think it's illegal for anyone to reverse-engineer and use it, then they're an idiot.
IMHO, this is just a risk of the business of FPGA circuits. If you make airplanes, expect to be sued by lawyers. If you sell tobacco, expect everyone to hate you. If you think that somkething has just as many rights under trade-secret protections as under copyright or patent protections, you're deluded.
Copyrights and patents exact a cost for their additional protections: Disclosure of the device or artistic work. You can either accept or reject the deal they offer.
... But in this case, it seems as if they (like UCITA/DMCA) wish to use law to rewrite the rules
Circuitry is the word.
Fill in cute tag line here...
Trade secrets are not protected by law. Of all the forms of intellectual property, trade secrets are the weakest and most unenforceable. The only way to keep something a trade secret is to make every single customer sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Reverse engineering is one of the key things that propels the advancement of consumer-level technology. One popular example: Sure, IBM would have loved to sue Compaq and win over Compaq's reverse engineering of the PC BIOS. As it stands, IBM probably lost significant revenue once the clones came marching in. Why? Decreased market share, and the costs of continued R&D, aka "competition". While IBM may have lost something, there is no question that both IBMs competitors and would-be customers benefitted.
Just because a company says "No, those are MY toys, you can't play with them!" doesn't mean that they deserve to have their wishes transcribed into law.
If anyone wants the specifications and RAR files, I have sucessfully reverse engeneered a turkey bagel. I plan to create my own turkey bagels, and market them under a diferent label. Would this be considered fair use? or THEFT! you decide.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
The phrase 'reverse engineering' was not used properly here. Reverse engineering would be looking at a black box... feeding it a bunch of inputs and noting the corresponding outputs. Then, from scratch, you construct a circuit that will produce the same output from a given set of input.
What that article describes is someone copying the data that is used to 'program' these PLDs. That, my friends, is theft. And it is *NOT* reverse engineering. It is no different than taking a binary executable, changing a bit or two and publishing it as your own. That is *NOT* reverse engineering.
So anyway, give the article a break... they screwed up when they described the copying as reverse engineering. Aside from that, it seemed like a good article.
The BIOS was copyrighted by IBM. No-one could make a clone without an equivalently functional BIOS, and IBM would have sued anyone who simply copied it. Hence the need to spec the BIOS as a black box, and reimplement it in a clean room.
Remember, this is DOS 1.0 we're talking about. Unlike a real OS, it does not abstract the hardware. You are right about only having to recreate the interface, but the interface is the hardware.
--
--
E_NOSIG
Actually, if I remember correctly, they did copy the hardware, or at least the case. IBM proved it by showing a screw hole that was originally included to hold an external battery pack, and remained although the battery pack had been redesigned. Not to be left out of some important new technology, the clones dutifully replicated the useless hole, thus showing that it was in fact a copy.
Why don't we see this in IP of other domains? Let's say an economist has come up with a new "innovative" theory, and that theory becomes his IP. Then a junior economist comes out, disect the theory into pieces, run it through scenario simulation, plug in all kinds of data to see how it works, and finally, figures that he changes a few premises in that theory, it would become a better theory.
Now, is the junior economist going to be sued for reverse-engineering?
How about those who are studying Sartre's existentialism? I'm sure the copyright on existentialism has not expired yet.
But reverse engineering by "black box" testing has been ruled as legal by the Supreme Court. It is perfectly legal to create a device that will create the same output for the same input. It would however be a copyright infringment to copy the circuit designs or code that goes with the device.
The mistake is in equating reverse engineering with doing a straight copy of the design.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
Reverse Engineering a product to make money is and should be legal. Determining the inputs and outputs of a program and using that to write your own logic and that does the same thing is completely moral. You are stealing nothing, you are creating a compatible interface to your own logic. Reading out the logic from a chip and writing it to another and selling it is not reverse engineering. It is copyright infringement, and possibly breach of contract depeding on your relationship with the vendor.
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
-Gandalf
Shameless Plug! If you like trance, tell me what you think!!
On another project we built such a cheap graphics accelerator we didn't want our competition to realize how easy it was - so we had all the off-the-shelf PALs and SRAMs screen-printed with our own part numbers to hide the design.
Also back before congress passed the law to make masks copyrightable people would regularly put in design features into chips that were designed to not be easily copied optically - for example a poly that was just a little bit narrow so that it became very unreliable if you cloned the chip without carefully hunting down in the masks and touching it up (that could make a chip work - but not reliably enough to make a sellable product - and could be really hard to find if all you have is masks and no idea of how the die's internals are supposed to work).
I urge all of you to write this industry mouthpiece and tell him where you stand, too.
And by the way, this might actually belong under the "Censorship" rather than the "Hardware" category - because what else do you call banning reverse engineering?
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
'Theft' by it's very nature implies something illegal.
From Webster:
Main Entry: theft
Pronunciation: 'theft
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English thiefthe, from Old English thIefth; akin to Old English thEof thief
Date: before 12th century
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
2 obsolete : something stolen
3 : a stolen base in baseball
If you don't mean theft THEN DON'T USE THE WORD.
-Nick
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
Incorrect. Reverse-engineering is, and always has been, a legitimate form of study and exploration.
The R&D investment by the high-tech industry is easily dwarfed by that of the automobile industry. Yet the auto industry has little problem with people opening the hoods of their cars and mucking around. Yes, it voids the warranty, but Detroit does not labor under the illusion that such exploration by their customers is "theft".
Trade secrets are a really dubious form of intellectual "property". The onus of proof is on the party claiming trade secret protection. Without going into nauseating details, trade secret protection can vanish once the secret is independently discovered by lawful means. In nearly all cases, reverse-engineering falls within lawful means, especially when taking apart systems available on the open market.
With reference to "black box" systems, it is especially those systems that need to be taken apart and inspected, or else how will you know they are good products? How will you know, for example, that they aren't selling your privacy down the river (CueCat, anyone?)?
"Disclosure" is a very different thing from "independent discovery," the latter being what we're talking about here.
BTW, if your company is relying on secrecy for its market advantage ("security by obscurity") rather than its ability to execute and deliver excellent products, you're ultimately hosed no matter what.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I support EFF too, I even got me a T-shirt for it :-)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Reverse Engineering - the "learning" you mention - is not theft.
But direct copying the product of others and profit by it without the producer's consent is theft !
And in the hardware sense, obfuscating the circuits with "sweetpots" (or "honeypots") has been practiced for a long-long time. The way the "sweetpots" work is to provide a place where the hacker (or whoever tried to poke into the circuit) can (not so easily) find, and in that "sweetpot", there are some semblence of coherent "secrets" and the role of the sweetpot is to fool the hackers to think that they have hit the "jackpot" but in actualities, the real mccoy is elsewhere.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The big three automakers will not make a car that lasts more than 5 years and so I'm never going to buy one.
A patent affords the ultimate protection, I agree, but how on EARTH can you possibly argue that people don't have the right to make reverse-engineering difficult?
Nothing stopping them doing that, except that doing so is likely to push up the manufacturing cost of the product. So when someone does produce a competing product they will be better able to undercut the original.
Trade secrets are not protected by the law, except when someone breaches an NDA or other contract forbidding them from revealing the secret. Legal protection for your invention is what you get for taking it to the patent office.
Take the example of the secret formula for Coca-Cola. Had they patented it, they could have prevented anyone from making a soft drink using the same recipe, no matter how they came across the recipe, for a period of twenty or so years. After that time, the recipe would be in the public domain and freely available for all to use.
Coca-cola didn't like the sound of this, so they decided to keep their formula secret. This works as long as the formula is in fact secret. Using trade secret protection allows you to keep your idea to yourself indefinitely, but the burden of protecting your secret falls on you alone, and is not shared by the legal system.
In fact, this is precisely what the article is trying to help companies with: making it difficult to discover trade secrets. If reverse engineering were illegal, as you think it is, the obfuscation of the circuitry would be unnecessary: anyone who reverse engineered a device would be breaking the law. As it is, reverse engineering is legal, and companies that want to protect their inventions using trade secrets have to consider techniques such as those described in order to keep their trade secrets truly secret.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
He is saying that _a thief_ can use reverse engineering to steal a competitor's design. He is not saying that someone that uses reverse-engineering is a thief. He is not saying that reverse engineering, in and of itself is illegal. There is not one sentence in the article that says "Reverse-engineering, for any reason is illegal." In fact there isn't anything close that I can see. But he is saying that reverse engineering can facilitate design theft.
"That pink animal with a snout is a pig." "Not all pigs are pink!"
He is saying that _a thief_ can use reverse engineering to steal a competitor's design.
Just about every tool and technique known to man can be used for illegal activities.
Which law applies to an FPGA design? Copyright law, is it an artistic work? Or is it an invention? (Patent law)
If it is an artistic work, then copyright would automatically apply.. But I could create a similar device and be free&clear.
If it is an invention, then they can either patent it or not. If it is unpatented, then I can use it IN ANY WAY as soon as I determine how it works. Their only protections are trade-secret protections. (Obfuscation)
It's strange to me that ANYTHING one does that someone else doesn't like is being called theft. Everything from an open DVD player, to MP3's, to Napster, to CueCat, to RIAA.
It's beginning to piss me off.
Scott
(FYI: Fair use rights apply to anything, individual or corporate.. A newspaper has the right to excerpt another publication for discussion or debate.)
"Quite frankly is someone can reverse engineer it, odds are it was so damn obvious, it didn't deserve protection in the first place."
... but say I don't want to bother looking it up; all I do is take the Programmable Chips (PGA, FPGA, CPLD) and copy them exactly to my own $1.00 chips. In the end, I remove all components and copy the circuit board.
I think 'reverse-engineering' in the sense of this article relates to copying and distributing technology in its exact form.
Take a look at DVD players for example (There are many examples though). DVD players are non-programmable devices. They serve no purpose to the consumer other than to take a dvd and throw it straight to a television unencrypted.
When people go to purchase a DVD player, the only thing they really want is something thats affordable and good quality, and lasts for a long time.
Well, if i was Fishbulb Heavy Industries in Sako Japan, and US patent and copyright law didn't quite hold up where I'm living, I could very easily take a nice, popular DVD player and pull it apart.
Inside, I would find a slew of resistors. I could decide there value with a $5.00 ohm meter if they weren't labelled. In fact I could decipher and note the value of all components within the player instantaniously using a multi-meter or just my eyes.
When it comes down to the encryption itself - well that's a hard deal to decipher. Sure its been done and suppressed
There ya go, I now have a cheap fabricating operation to start-up which will yield millions of dollars; because I sell my DVD players for $50 less, and had to invest 0 dollars in R&D.
This entire scenario applies to graphics cards, sound cards, 3Com hardware, Cisco hardware... it applies to everything. It's only reverse engineering because copying the chips requires pulling them open.
to recap: "If figuring out how something works is a crime, then curosity should be outlawed." - I agree 100%, and I even agree that bad technology shouldn't generate money, it should be open-source. If however, I designed some awesome new doohickey, as i'm sure to do in the future, I don't want it to be stolen by some know-nothing capitalist and sold as "as good as the competition only cheaper".
Curiosity and Cash don't often hold the same moral arguments.
Ace
The story is not about patents; it is about trade secrets, which are not protected in the same way. The whole idea of obfuscating the circuitry would not be necessary if the contents were protected by patents. Since they are not protected by patent (apparently, see previous statement), making them difficult to reverse engineer increases the secrecy and therefore adds an additional measure of protection for the trade secrets contained.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
As for reverse engineering being theft: it is. You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected. Do you want your company's trade secrets disclosed? Not really. That's why reverse engineering is not a good thing.
Clean room reverse engineering is not theft. If you can duplicate the function of a black box without knowing how it works, then you haven't stolen any trade secrets.
Clean-room reverse engineering must continue to be legally protected. The whole idea behind the clean-room process is that you have one group analyze the original, to create a specification which describes what it does, without describing how it works.
This specification is then given to a second team, which has no knowledge about the design of the orignal, and is therefore clean. The second team then designs their device to meet these specs --thereby duplicating the function of the original without stealing any trade secrets.
This is the process which led to the first PC clone. You're not suggesting that Compaq or Phoenix stole IBM's trade secrets...are you?
you said:
You can obfuscate stuff all you want, but it will not stop someone that really wants to copy something from doing it. All you can do is make it a little harder for them to do.
he said:
When concerned about design cracking, keep in mind that the objective is not necessarily to incorporate state-of-the-art security that would protect Fort Knox. Your job is to come up with an approach that, at minimum, takes slightly longer to circumvent than the time beyond which the media's worth becomes negligible
you said:
As for legality it all depends on what they do exactly and where.
If they grab your copyrighted 'code' and just clone it, then that is a copyright violation in many countries.
he said:
Having a bad day? Maybe you've just received word that a competitor (perhaps in a country whose copyright- and patent-protection laws and corresponding enforcement are less stringent than those in your abode)
sheesh.
Also, wrt trade secrets: keep in mind the reason patents are protected and trade secrets are not. Trade secrets do not benefit society the way that patents do, and thus society provides no incentive for their creation. Reverse engineering is an important mechanism in encouraging people to patent -- and thus disclose to society, and offer (eventually) to the public domain -- their inventions. If reverse-engineering becomes theft, essentially society is granting monopoly rights but getting nothing in return. This is a bad deal, one that society should not put up with.
Bottom line: if you don't want your discovery copied, patent it. Otherwise, it's still free for the taking, as it should be. Monopoly over your invention is a trade with society, for your putting that invention in the public domain. It's not a right -- you don't get it for nothing.
As for reverse engineering being theft: it is. You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected.
Actually, no. Trade secrets are just that - secrets. If someone is able to look at your product and figure out what its secrets are, tough. The legal protection they have is generally in the form of employee contracts/ non-disclosure agreements. If a company makes a product, and chooses to try to keep parts of it a trade secret, they will have their employees/ associates sign some form of contract stating that should they be found giving out information, they will be sued. If someone without inside information learns a secret through reverse engineering etc, they haven't broken any laws. If a company *really* wants their products protected, they PATENT them. The reason something is kept a trade secret is because patents run out, and sometimes it's worth taking the risk that an outsider will learn the secret if there's a good chance no one ever will.
Coke is a great example of this. Coke *could* have patented their recipe, but because food items are so hard to "reverse engineer," they chose to keep it a secret instead. If someone working at Pepsi figures out what the recipe to Coke is (without insider information), they wouldn't be in a position to be sued. Patents and trade secrets were originally designed to be beneficial to society - no company can maintain a legal stranglehold on a product/ idea indefinately, but are afforded a legal option (patents) to protect a product/ idea temporarily.
Otherwise, yes, interoperability is one of the main (only?) reasons that reverse engineering is considered a fair use.
--
The premis of the disguised circuit board (in the novel, I haven't seen the movie) was that the real circuit board would exist in some sort of field that would completely wipe the real circuitry if the device was opened improperly. The fake board consisted of circuitry that was already blown, leaving the opener of the device to find a blown board that the opener would apparently assume was the real board that self destructed in the opening of the device.
A bit more clever than the original poster suggested, but still prone to getting hacked. In the book they just installed a hidden camera to watch the alien build the magic black box. In real life, I'd imagine there would be all sorts of non-intrusive scans that could find the "hidden" board.
have a day,
-l
The opportunity to slashdot a phone number!
I just tried it, its busy. Easy way to avoid a slashdotted number is to take the phone off the hook. And the author can only take one call at a time, as opposed to thousands of simultaneous connections against a website.
I'm not sure why xtermz thinks this is a one sided article. I've read it, and it seems to be prety even-handed. There is a problem in the ASIC/FPGA world, with well funded criminals quickly reverse engineering electronic items, and then flooding the market with cheap copies. It hurts the company that spend a lot of R&D money to be ripped off easily, so a number of ASIC and controller manufacuturers are adding clever circuitry to prevent easy hardware copying.
Hardware reverse engineering was getting easier and easier over the last few decades. Its about time it got interesting (in a difficult crossword puzzle kind of way) again.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Sorry, no. General Motors has a whole building in Warren, Michigan devoted to taking apart cars from other companies. They look at methods used, quality of construction, and new ways of thinking about car design. Even though they can't copy patented mechanisms, they learn a whole lot about how they can make their product better.
Why do people think reverse engineering is the same as theft?
OK... here's an odd question that popped into my head:
The DMCA explicitly allows for reverse engineering for compatability purposes. What if I am interested in reverse engineering a circuit design, piece of code, etc. not for compatibility purposes, but in order to determine if they designer/implementor is infringing on a patent that I or my company holds?
Now, according to the DMCA, I'm a criminal - I've engaged in reverse engineering for other purposes than compatibility. No matter that I may have proof, via the reverse engineering, that someone was infriging on a patent; according the the DMCA, I committed a crime in order to obtain that information.
Am I missing something here? Or does the DMCA - which it's advocates touted as being essential to protecting intellectual property in today's digital world - allow someone to essentially ignore patents under the right circumstances?
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
I don't see how reverse engineering is terribly different than, say, trying to replicate the taste of Coke. There are tons of knock-offs of Coca-Cola, and I doubt any one of them wasn't spawned from someone trying to recreate Coke.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
This is totally different from simply stealing a design. This second type of reverse engineering is obviously what the article is about.
Duplicating an unpatented design is not theft.
That's the whole point of a patent -- in exchange for disclosing your design, you gain government protection. Without a patent, you have no legal protection for your design, and your design enters the public domain the instant someone examines it and realizes how it works.
Just because the author wants reverse engineering to == theft doesn't make it so.
How do you think Polaroid found out that Kodak had ripped off thier patents on instant cameras more than a decade ago. Thier engineers bought one and cracked it open. Polaroid sued and the judge ordered Kodak to pay restitution and try to recall EVERY Kodak instant camera sold. They are now pretty rare collectables.
I don't think this is right. What would be the purpose of a clean room, with engineers who've never seen the source, if they then sit right down and decompile?
Reverse engineering would be sending in a message and seeing what comes out, then making your thing produce the same output for a given input.
Pete
i think it's fascinating that here's a circuit that they built themselves, and they still cannot figure out how it works... reverse engineering has its limits!
PS. isn't code stored in NVRAM and used to program reconfigurable logic chips subject to the same copyright laws as any computer program? so presumably ripping this off and using it in your own product has about the same legality as selling a dodgy copy of MS Word... despite what others have said about trade secrets, there seems to be a fine line here between a "trade secret" and a "copyrightable piece of code". hmm.
Pete
In the specific case you bring up, if Mackie had truly done something original and protected it under internationally-recognized IP laws, and Berringer did use protected technology in their board, then Mackie should prosecute the criminal actions of Berringer. Outlawing the act of taking something apart would not have prevented Berringer's actions here, as I see it.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
That's funny, because I'm looking forward to the revolution. Don't fear the reaper, baby, unless of course you're a huge multinational with more lawyers than sense.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The author is obviously a dill-hole!
Check him out:
SMILE!
Sony has bought stock in said magazine and is voicing their opinions through it (NO REVERSE ENGINEERING). What if this kind of stuff was going on when cars were developed? That's how chevy did it, reversed engineering, made a car of their own...
How Jaded Are You?
Thus, portions of the "fake" circuits were in fact used, but the actual connections between them were obscured because no one ever figured out that the insulator did in fact conduct in some places.
Until this one primitive human came along and figured this all out in (I think) a few pages. The book wasn't a lot better than the movie, but I was sick on my back for two days with nothing better to read.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
- A patent
- A copyright
- A trademark
That's it. IANAL, but I believe there are some provisions against stealing intellectual property, where "stealing" means breaking into an office and physically taking/copying trade secret material. That is a crime because the "trade secret" was obtained through a criminal act.However, in this country, there is no such law outlawing reverse engineering, not even the DMCA. The DMCA forbids the circumvention of copyright protection other than for interoperability, so whether that circumvention was obtained through reverse engineering or not is irrelevant (which makes me wonder if I could publish my weak protection scheme and still claim that the DMCA applies, but that's another story...).
In fact, if it were legal to reverse engineer, every single "invention" would be illegal. Let's see... birds can fly... I want to build a flying machine... ILLEGAL. Fire good, fire warm, me want fire, me bang rocks... ILLEGAL. I want to cure a disease... unfortunately I cannot analyze the disease because that would be... ILLEGAL.
So, unless you have it patented, consider it public domain once you release a product. Horrors, you may actually have to compete in a free market! Oh dear God, no!
In the perfect world, vague overgeneralized IP laws would apply to everyone except me, and then I would be your god.
A choice of masters is not freedom
Circuitry
Circuitry
Circuitry
Circuitry
Circuitry
Circuitry
ispell, anyone?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the first IBM compatible PC's the result of reverse engineering the IBM BIOS?
XXXX XXXX Road
XXXX XXXX
Auckland
New Zealand
Wednesday 18th October, 2000
Dear Mr. Brian Dipert,
I am writing to express my concern with an article you wrote recently. To quote from the article, "...the other harder but possibly even more damaging form of theft is reverse-engineering'...".This attitude is quite disturbing. Reverse engineering is a cornerstone of technological development, especially when dealing with companies like Microsoft, famous for their "embrace and extend" tactics with regards to standards. Reverse engineering has also been found by your Supreme Court to be legal; I (and many other like-minded software developers) consider your statement linking reverse engineering and theft to be defamatory.
Obviously, I'm not intending to sue you (as I'm not American, and I'm not that rich :-). But an apology would be nice; it's quite offensive to find myself publicly branded a thief when I am simply seeking to better an existing technology, in a fashion which has been deemed legal in the highest court in the U.S.A.
Yours sincerely,
XXXX XXXX
As for reverse engineering being theft: it is. You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected.
The only legal protection of trade secrets is protection against their being revealed by "insiders." Trade secrets may be legitimately revealed by reverse engineering, and then they cease to be trade secrets -- they are in the public domain, with no protection.
This is good.
Do you want your company's trade secrets disclosed?
If you want the government to provide you with a monopoly on your invention, you need to file for a patent, and completely disclose your invention. It's your choice. Choosing the trade secret route carries benefits and drawbacks. The benefit is that you don't have to disclose. The drawback is that you are subject to reverse engineering.
God Sues Genetic Scientists
Today God the almighty sued many genetic scientists under the DMCA for "stealing" or reverse-engineering his trade secret, also known as DNA to us mortals. In a news conference, God stated "I obfuscated my code as much as I could and these thieves came along and stole the patterns".
A court date has not been set in fear of God's reaction if it is determined that the DMCA is in fact unconstitutional and the scientists are cleared. However, if the DMCA is upheld, noone really wants to witness the wrath of God the almighty on these poor thieves, err scientists.
"Circuitery" is not the correct spelling. Please fix the spelling error in the story title.
-b
Reverse engineering can be defined on so many levels it isn't right to just broadly categorize it as theft!
When we figure out how quantum mechanics work, we are essentially reverse engineering it (from God, the universe, whatever).
There is no judgement on that practice, only on the applications derived from the knowledge gained!
In a similar way, reverse engineering a product can be said to be similar. Intel produces a high commodity, high volume, very popular part.
Is it fair for AMD to produce a plug in replacement part to try to make a profit?
Yes. There's nothing illegal about that, it's just commercialism/capitalism.
Now, as for the gritty details of reverse engineering... As long as you don't take the work that someone else has done, there's not way to qualify that as theft. You haven't taken their research, you haven't taken their documents, you haven't taken their personal. All you have done is taken their product, which you own if you purchase it, and analyzed it, which is fair use if anything is, and watched it work, which is no more or less wrong than trying to find another particle in the quantum menagerie.
Trade secrets are not legally protected. Patents are. Do we want company trade secrets disclosed? Of course not! But they are only trade secrets while they are unknown, and the minute they are known, they are not trade secrets.
Reverse engineering has given us the PC! It has given us PSX emulators, Gameboy emulators, Linux SAMBA(I think), DeCSS, and loads of other things. In a competitive landscape, reverse engineering seems downright commendable!
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
This whole story should be modded down as "Troll". Quit stirring up trouble with inflamatory headlines and out of context quotes. Hemos, you and several other /. "editors" need to go and read the Linux-PR HOWTO again. Behave yourselves as decent and responsible members of the community or you find yourselves with the level of community respect that currently reserved for your very own /. trolls.
/. speak, is copyright violation, and that is theft. It is not what we call reverse-engineering.
What this guy is talking about, translated to
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
That what this piece read like. I'm sending this an angry email telling him that I resent his calling me a thief for having done my job while legally employed firms conducting legitimate business.
[expletive deleted] [expletive deleted]
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Seems the article mentions physical countermeasures like "antifuses" that apparently make it difficult for a user to probe a system without destroying the device...
Perfect for protecting your proprietary teleportation consoles from the prying hands of Hockners, Chatovarians or even lowly man-animals. =)
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
In particular, the following text gives me tremendous pause:
I met a bear once. He had tremendous paws.
Sorry.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
- Accolade used a two- step process to render its video games compatible with the Genesis console. First, it "reverse engineered" Sega's video game programs in order to discover the requirements for compatibility with the Genesis console. As part of the reverse engineering process, Accolade transformed the machine- readable object code contained in commercially available copies of Sega's game cartridges into human- readable source code using a process called "disassembly" or "decompilation".[1] Accolade purchased a Genesis console and three Sega game cartridges, wired a decompiler into the console circuitry, and generated printouts of the resulting source code. Accolade engineers studied and annotated the printouts in order to identify areas of commonality among the three gameprograms. They then loaded the disassembled code back into a computer, and experimented to discover the interface specifications for the Genesis console by modifying the programs and studying the results. At the end of the reverse engineering process, Accolade created a development manual that incorporated the information it had discovered about the requirements for a Genesis- compatible game. According to the Accolade employees who created the manual, the manual contained only functional descriptions of the interface requirements and did not include any of Sega's code.
This was eventually found to be legal.I believe one of the reasons for clean room reverse engineering is stated in the last line there, to make sure none of Sega's IP (their copyrighted code) gets copied into the new code. Copyright only covers implementation, so clean room reverse engineering translates Sega's implentation into conceptual stuff that copyright can't cover and then into Accolade's implentation, without skipping the concept part.
--
Is it illegle to make a key for your _own_ house? If I have bought a device then I have to right to use it however I want, as long as I don't violate copyright laws. (i.e. make a bunch of copies and sell them)
Stealing services is already against the law. That is why there is a little FBI warning at the beginning of every Movie that you rent.
However, I don't consider bypassing a lock that prevents me from using a DVD I bought in India on my american made DVD player to be stealing. If you do, then you probably work for the companies that are trying to rip me off, and are only in here Astroturfing.
-- Never make a general statement.
They were sued. They won. The WinTel PC industry was born. This doesn't even take into account the amount of software "look and feel" cloning that took place some 8-9 years later.
If figuring out how something works is a crime, then curosity should be outlawed. Quite frankly is someone can reverse engineer it, odds are it was so damn obvious, it didn't deserve protection in the first place.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Yes.
At first I thought they were just errors. But then I learned that these 'mistakes' were intentional. I don't recall if I read about it or saw it on TV, but someone from a map publisher was interviewed about and confirmed the practise.
As for the examples, here are a couple I think are instances of this, but they could be errors.
I've seen maps of NJ that show a town called "Hiltons" between Atlantic Highlands and Highlands. I grew up in Atlantic Highlands. There is no such town.
When I first moved to Burlington county NJ I picked up some maps so that I could find my way around. Twice I got messed up because short (>= 1/2 mile) roads marked on the map didn't exist.
Finally, a map I own (I live in NJ but I'm in CA on business now or I'd dig out the map and give an exact reference) the condo complex I live in is not shown and a road that does not exist is shown instead.
Steve M
I know, no one wanted to be reminded of that movie, I never saw it, but thats one of the things I thought was cool about the book. There was a race somewhere that made circuitry that was uncopyable because the actual wires were embedded inside the circuit board and there were fake dummy wires on the outside. So people would look at it and try to make an exact copy, and they would look the same but it wouldn't work (because all the circuitry you could see was just BS). The real stuff was printed kind of like a watermark on the board.
-Stype
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
Exactly why this article is being blown out of proportion.
My '93 Explorer is still going strong has 130k miles on it and the tires have only exploded once .... (seriously)
This is a very useful article describing techniques to protect the designs that you or your company have worked very hard to create. There are a lot of unscrupulous companies who would love nothing better than to *steal* (yes, it is theft) your designs, rather than generating their own. The article outlines various countermeasures against this.
It doesn't surprise me that the zealots on this board scream like bloody hell every time someone feels like protecting their hard work. But many fail to realize that open-source and code sharing is a choice - it is most certainly NOT obligatory.
If you choose not to share your work, you have every right to make it difficult for others to steal. That's why I lock my house, use encryption, and use a non-trivial root password. Why on earth is security for embedded devices any less important than it is for PC's?
What is pissing me off now is that most of the replies are coming from people with absolutely no fucking clue on digital logic, and there they go blahing about reverse engineering. Get a fucking grip people, go get some clue. Reverse engineering is about taking something about, figuring out how it works, and then building your own from scratch, and usually WITH THE AIM TO COME UP WITH A BETTER PRODUCT. If you are going to reverse engineer A only to build B where B is equal or inferior to A, then fuck off you are a THIEF. This is what this article is about, it can be automated for some ASCI chips, you plug in the chip, your hardware with combination of your software brute forces all possible output and input to that chip, generates a map, solves the equation, and bam, you burn into your own ASIC chips. Basically, this is not reverse engineering, this is downright copying, cuz you are not understanding how the chip works, you are just freaking cloning it. The important thing to note about chip design is that the logic is not all that matters, but the actually hardware, but for very small devices, it becomes the logic. And they need to be protected. Blah, I hate the slasdot generation, why the hell am I still reading slashdot.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
But it didn't (at least in our case) and the added cost per board was in the pennies/board range (back when things cost $1000+ each).
The optical semiconductor tricks (which I never had anything to do with) were designed as traps for people who were copying masks, the features worked correctly on the original because they were carefully designed with tight tollerances - remember there used to be NO legal copyright for masks so people could (and did) take photos of someone's chips, lift the layers out and make masks then run the results through their own fab and start selling competing chips - little more than photocopying someone's hard work.
On the other hand I did once visit a site where they has a whole-room photo-micrograph of the original IBM VGA chip on the floor and had a whole bunch of college summer hires doing manual pattern recognition to a cell library looking for hidden functionality that IBM hadn't documented (extra registers etc etc). I think that that sort of reverse engineering is completely OK - you're after the architecture in order to make a functionally equivalent part, not the circuit or original logic (gates) - it's the difference between disassembling a DVD implementation to get a spec for how it works so that you can write your own (DeCSS for example) - and just stealing the code and including it in your app.
1. Reverse engineering absolutely never occurs aka "Perfectly Secret Engineering". Even when a design feature is obvious (such as a winglet on a plane) other companies cannot copy it. They must arrive at the same conclusions as the first company through trial and error. Knowledge never passes into the public domain unless someone explicitly places is there.
Outcome: Technology stagnates due to duplication of effort. There is a lack of incentive to innovate because once a product is sufficiently complex as to be difficult to duplicate, the company that originated the idea will have a long time before anybody can duplicate it. Companies will drown in a sea of paperwork required to prove that they arrived at the same design independantly.
2. Unlimited reverse engineering aka "Perfect Reverse Engineering". All products may be disassembled and duplicated without hinderence of patent, trade secrecy, or any other form of intellectual property. Knowledge flow is instantaneous from creator to user.
Outcome: The tragedy of the commons. Companies will play "wait-n-see" to see who comes up with difficult to engineer solutions to problems. If they are making a profit, they will not bother to spend money on R&D. The outlay can't be justified for the low expected return. Companies will only innovate when the entire business segment is threatened. Because all companies share IP in this scenario, the entire sector would have to be threated before it would decide to innovate. If even one company were making a profit, then the failing companies would blame their marketing or management departments. Actually, marketing and management techniques are also IP, and would be shared too. Effectively, such a situation would be akin to a monopoly, since all companies would have the same IP, and would be different companies in name only.
It shouldn't be a surprise that both of these scenarios suck. An equillibrium is required. Politics is the art of compromise. Geeks need to recognize that compromise is a necessary part of the equation. That means Free Software people tolerating some patents, trademarks, and copyrights. That means businesses tolerating some hacking, reverse engineering, and parodies.
Does this provide an easy answer to the questions? Of course not. There is no easy answer. The opposing parties and the mediator(s) are all part of a complex solution. Here's hoping that we can remain civil, and arrive at solutions that provide a fair balance for each individual case.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...but had the company that created the ASIC/FPGA/"other 4-letter acronym device" encrypted the configuration bit stream (which is decrypted on the ASIC) - even if it was simple ROT-13 - you would be in violation of the DMCA provisions regarding encrypted streams, etc...
This world is rapidly becoming a fucked place, and I fear a revolution is brewing...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The story is right, but you have the wrong computer.
Apple's ROMs had entrypoints that were all over the ROMs' address range, because they didn't want to dedicate any area as a jump table. Franklin copied the ROM verbatim, as rewriting it would screw up the entrypoints. Apple sued Franklin, and WON.
IBM made the BIOS (with function numbers instead of haphazard entry vectors) specifically so that it could be re-written, extended, improved over time. They PUBLISHED the source code to the whole BIOS, and knew that this put them in the risk of being cloned. COMPAQ rewrote the BIOS, function by function, complying with the data interfaces only. IBM sued COMPAQ, and LOST.
[
As an intellectual property attorney, I am appalled by the stance taken by the author of that article. Below please find the letter I just e-mailed him to briefly correct his misperceptions:
d f2.htm , I find it particularly disturbing that you refer to reverse engineering as "theft." In particular, the following text gives me tremendous pause:
In reference to your article, "Cunning Circuits Confound Crooks," found at: http://www.ednmag.com/ednmag/reg/2000/10122000/21
"The other harder but possibly even more damaging form of theft is "reverse-engineering." In that scenario, someone uses the information stored in the programmable-logic device to reconstruct the original circuit details and then alters and incorporates those details in part or whole into other designs." Your analysis is woefully misguided.
Intellectual property protections in the United States exist for copyright, trademark, patent and trade secret information, and each of these areas includes its own particular set of limitations. These limitations are present for very good reasons, ranging from free speech to the encouragement of innovation. For any truly new, useful and unobvious circuit, patent protection can be obtained -- protection that gives the inventor the exclusive right to manufacture, use and sell the patented invention for a limited time. However, that protection comes at a price: the inventor must disclose to the world precisely how to make and use the invention, so that others may build upon it and so that further innovation may be encouraged.
Similarly, trade secret protection also has limitations. Trade secrets are protected only while they are precisely that: secret. Since trade secret protection (a) gives unlimited time-duration protection, and (b) fails to educate the rest of the world and thereby foster further innovation, it is extremely limited. Once a given technology is no longer secret, it may be used by anyone freely.
If a circuit designer decides to forego the greater protections afforded by patent, he or she cannot complain about reverse engineering under the law. So long as someone is not directly infringing a copyright (or mask work) by literally copying a chip design, they are free to use the underlying ideas to improve their own devices.
Reverse engineering is not theft, either legally or ethically, and I suggest that you consider my comments in your journalistic pursuits.
Joffrey X. XXXXXXXX
xxxxx & xxxxx, LLP
No, really! I'm one of the *good* lawyers!
I think you're confusing theory and practice.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I used to work for Chipworks which does reverse-engineering for a living. Most of their work is to protect intellectual property from infringers.
They also used their tools to recover data from a flight computer in the Swissair crash. Is that a bad thing?
The classic method of reverse-engineering a programmable-logic design involves cycling through all possible device input combinations and capturing the corresponding output bit patterns. By using essentially a huge Karnaugh map (often with high-powered computer help) or through visual inspection of data patterns, a thief can derive the Boolean equations that define the internal logic.
The author is not being clever about this, and I'm not being dull. He is not saying theives can reverse engineer (or any verb) , therfore people who reverse engineer (or any verb) are theives. He is saying that reverse engineering is theft. It's a boldface lie rather than bad logic.
This is an attempt to shape public opion the same way Billy G. did with software EULAs and the RIAA did with music copying. Making a logic table between input and output is not theft and people who do it are not theives. The author has lumped such people criminal activity, lazyness and moraly questionable judgement. If it's wrong for companies to do on moral grounds, it's wrong for you and me too, isn't it? Sorry, I don't buy it, and he deserves the flaming he got here for the attempt.
OK sorry to say that I think any company that puts a product into the hands of the 'user' and does'nt expect them to do f**kall with it is a moron sure the intended porpose or a cd is'nt a coaster but you all agree that it certaily would work as one if you put a constraint on how an item is used you lose buyers and thats it. If along with those bloody aol mailers came a 'you may not use this as a coaster or destroy or throw out this data cd... ok you all get the point no one will *ever* stop everyone from doing something with a product thats not it's original intent and that would simply include along with it reverse enginering or simply how the heck does it work..... Where are my flying cars I want my flying cars - only good IBM commercial I've seen
There is evidence to prove both Democrats and Republicans are lying cocksuckers. Vote independently.
It depends on what the ulterior motive is. The issue is if you are studying things to find out how they work with the intention to create a compatible item to undersell your competitor. Now, obviously, I don't think this is wrong because Competition Is Good (tm). Again, we go back to the reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS. There was no harm there. It's capitalism at its best.
Maybe it sucks for the company that created the idea/product because they now don't have a monopoly (which, the last time I checked, was a good thing), but it sure as hell isn't theft. Any claims like that are ridiculous.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."