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Brief Analysis On Reverse Engineering Software

Posted by timothy on from the why-not-for-better-cheaper-faster?! dept.

An unnamed correspondent writes: " An article on PlanetIT.com discusses a court ruling that establishes the reverse-engineering of hardware and software as legal, under the "fair use" umbrella. What ramifications does this have in the industry? Can I reverse-engineer MS Word and write a word processor that can read and save .DOC files?" The article also asks the eternal burning question "Is the DMCA contradicting itself?" Though the court cases this piece deals with aren't new, the issues they deal with aren't going away, and it turns out that the Bleem and DeCSS cases may have more influence on other reverse engineering cases than anyone anticipated. Will sense chase out absurdity?

3 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. We have forgotten the IBM PC by T. · · Score: 5

    The IBM PC was reverse engineered. Barely within the boundary of legality. But legal, nonetheless. If this had not happened, would we now live in the so-called "information age"? Probaly not. Reverse engineering and mass-producing the IBM PC clone put real computing power in the hands of almost anyone who really wanted it. Why should we now make illicit the same proletarian and, dare I say, egalitarian mechanism that put us where we are today?

  2. What's the difference between bleem! and DeCSS? by kaosmunkee · · Score: 5

    From PlanetIT article:

    "The Reimerdes case dealt with somebody who didn't have a right to the DVD but was cracking through it to get the code, whereas the Connectix case dealt with a situation where a company was legally entitled to be using the code and reverse-engineering it for purposes of interoperability."

    Keith Kupferschmid, intellectual property counsel at the Software and Information Industry Association

    I may be missing something here, but I don't see the distinction. PlayStation is a proprietary platform. PlayStation games were built to run on that platform. bleem! was written to allow people who had purchased a license to a PlayStation game to play it on some platform other than PlayStation.

    DVD players are a proprietary platform (because of the "decryption" code they contain). DVD's are built (encoded) to be played on that platform. DeCSS was written to allow people who had purchased a license to a DVD movie to play it on some platform other than a commercial DVD player.

    Am I missing something here?

    --Kaos

  3. Reverse Engineering file formats by Pedrito · · Score: 5

    I reverse engineered quite a few MS file formats (see my out-of-print book Undocumented Windows File Formats) and never had any hassles from MS regarding the reverse engineering.

    In fact, MS tried to hire me to provide them with the specs for one of their file formats. Apparently the author of the code never documented the file format. MS had released specs for it, but they were completely wrong.

    After being told by several friends that MS was notorious for delaying payment with contractors, I asked for half the money up-front. They refused and I never did the work.

    But I digress. I reverse engineered a number of file formats that were "proprietary" Microsoft files. If they're going to go after anyone for it, surely they would have gone after me since I was publishing them left and right in magazines and my book.

    I've figured ever since then that MS must have known that the whole thing about reverse engineering in their licenses must be unenforceable.

    You can also look at all the work Andrew Schulman and Matt Pietrek did reverse engineering Windows code and the PE file format and neither of them ever got hassled either, as far as I know.

    Pete Davis