Contract Case Could Hurt Reverse Engineering

An anonymous reader writes "InfoWorld has an article about how a 'U.S. Supreme Court decision could call into question a common practice among software companies: studying competitors' products to improve their own offerings.'"

Comments

Re:Alternative Installers?

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

So what are the rules if you don't actually install the software? Instead you manually unpack the software on to the drive and never click on any 'I agree' button.

Back in the days when I was heavily into reverse engineering, we occasionally did things like this as a "learning exercise" ( it's really not that difficult to blow away a couple of calls to MessageBoxA with a carpet of NOP's, so the value of the exercise is questionable at best ).

The advice we got ( albeit, not from real lawyers ) was that the wording of ( most ) of the EULA's stated that we had no right to use the software short of viewing and acknowledging the license, regardless of the monies we might have tendered for it. No click, no license, illegal usage. The cash is just to get you to that screen, although the more generous ones will allow you to return the software for a refund if you refuse to comply.

The analogy made at the time was that jumping around the license acceptance screens one way or the other to get at the juicy marrow^Wsoftware within is like sneaking onto a skydiving plane to avoid signing the disclaimer of liabilities, even if you've paid in advance. It's a pretty awful analogy.

Any and all lawyers are invited to present a non-crappy analogy. :-)

-- YLFI

IEEE position

[sir_cello]

The IEEE USA is pursuing this:

* Press release regarding Baystate v Bowers:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/releases/2003/0604 03pr.html

* Details of the amicus curiae, etc:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/forum/policy/2003/Bay state0 60203.html

* General position on reverse engineering:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/forum/POSITIO NS/reverse.htm l

Other Issues

[sir_cello]

There are international agreements that imply allowance of reverse engineering. The US is a signatory to these.

TRIPS:

"Article 9, 2. Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such."
[http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips _e/t_agm 3_e.htm]

WTO Copyright Treaty:

"Article 2, Copyright protection extends to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such."
[http://www.wipo.org/eng/diplconf/distrib/ 94dc.htm ]

If you really want to read about this and reverse engineering in depth, try:

* "REVERSE ENGINEERING & DECOMPILATION OF COMPUTER PROGRAMS" [http://www.indlaw.com/publicdata/Articles/4_6_200 1_2_57_29_PM_Indlaw/article.pdf]

* "Reverse Engineering Clauses in Current Shrinkwrap and Clickwrap Contracts" [http://www.cptech.org/ecom/ucita/licenses/reverse .html]

* "THE LAW & ECONOMICS OF REVERSE ENGINEERING" [http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/l&e reveng5.pdf]

* "REVERSE ENGINEERING UNDER SIEGE" [http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/CACM on Bunner.pdf]

say goodbye to samba

[protect imagination]

i'm surprised nobody has mentioned samba yet. the samba team have been careful to work outside THE LAW (or at least it's jurisdiction), but it's only a matter of time before the world leading superpower pressures other nation states to "harmonize" their laws with the US:

CNN Article from 2000 "There are rather insane laws in the U.S. about reverse engineering, and so we sidestepped those by having the work done in Europe under the European Union fair-use laws," said Jeremy Allison, a software developer at VA Linux Systems Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif. Allison co-authored Samba, a Windows file-serving program that allows Unix machines to serve file-and-print services to Windows clients. Allison said his team is forced to reverse engineer because Microsoft doesn't offer documentation of its proprietary protocols. But when the Samba team decoded the Microsoft domain controller protocol to allow Samba servers to interoperate with Windows NT, they made sure the work took place outside the U.S.