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:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

What about for making things compatible with it, or for research? What if someone slaps a EULA on a virus, and then sues anti-virus researchers?

Sounds like copyright infringement instead...

[benjamindees]

Meeker noted that Baystate had reproduced a handful of errors in Bowers program. Kann, Baystate's lawyer, said all the errors came from Bowers' user interface, not the underlying code.

Re:Sounds like copyright infringement instead...

[cait56]

My initial read is somewhat similiar. A judge has come up with faulty reasoning to support what seems right. But they should come up with the correct rationale. The rationale offered would be chilling.

If customers have the right to examine products, and determine what they like and dislike about each, then it isn't much of a leap to say that producers have the same right to examine their competitor's products.

But there's a line somewhere between studying what some product does, and essentially stealing its research. Whatever the protection mechanism should be, it should stop lazy companies from simply stealing interface designs from other companies rather than paying to develop them on their own.

So it is pretty much copyright infringement, except that some allowance has to be made for the ability of the market to clone interfaces from dominant providers.

Copyright also provides an excellent insight into what contract law must not be allowed to create here. No author is allowed to sell their mystery to the general public except that no other mystery writer may read it for the purpposes of evaluating what was effective or ineffective.

Indeed many writers want to aware of what others have written, so they can ensure that they don't inadvertently write something too similiar to an existing book.

The bottom line is that the term "reverse engineering" should never be applied to observing the external behavior of a product. To me that term implies trying to figure out how the product works, not to trying to figure what the product does.

Slavishly copying what a product does, before the product has an established user base, also strikes me as improper copying. I'll admit I do not know how to define that line. It may be similiar to judgement calls made on when fictional characters have achieved "cultural icon" status.

La la la...

[Ayanami Rei]

Poor baby.

By this logic, you should be able to take apart your car to see what kind of pieces it's made of. God forbid.

It's not the disassembly that's bad, it's when you use it to create a competing product. OTH, if it works exactly the same, the original designers will be able to see that it's bug-compatible (including race conditions), and thus be able to invoke some flavor of IP violation.

And when your oh-so-precious product crashes my systems and I want to single step through it to see what you fucked up, what tools will I be able to use besides these illegal tools to give you a point to start debugging at?

Re:Errors replicated?

[The Vulture]

Not necessarily.

The company that I used to work for was making a router-type product for the cable internet industry. Seeing as Cisco is considered the industry leader, it was highly desirable to copy the Cisco CLI commands, down to the exact command syntax (where possible).

The reverse engineering in my particular case involved typing in commands at the Cisco CLI, and then looking at either the configuration file, or SNMP MIBs to see the results (which is considered reverse engineering, even though I didn't look at any Cisco code).

Now, suppose I put in a very counter-intuitive command, or even a command which was considered to be "in error" (i.e. confusing syntax, whatever). Would you say that something fishy is going on? We're just trying to keep the interface as similar to Cisco as possible.

The article said that the error looked to be in the UI and not in any underlying code. Of course, the question is, were both programs done in the same language, use the same GUI toolkit, etc? Look and feel alone do not constitute full-blown "code-ripping", as we used to call this years ago.

-- Joe

Re:It's about time

[RTPMatt]

wait just a second, just what is ment by "studying competitors' products"?

does this mean that if i have used M$ office say, at my college, i am unable to contribute to open office, or some other office type project?

this is incredibly stupid in my (uneducated) opinion. whats next, are we going to tell authors they cannot write books about a subject if they read a different book on the subject beforehand?
fantastic, only people completly uneducated in a subject will be able to do anything in the field. this should make for some fantastic inovation!!

-matt

Re:It's about time

[Waffle Iron]

Did you type your comment on a PC? If so, was it an IBM brand PC? If not, you're using a totally reverse-engineered machine, and by your definition that's illicit stolen goods. You're no better than a common thief.

To atone for your sins, you need to take a cue from Senator Hatch and physically destroy your machine. Now.

Reverse engineering is good

[hibiki_r]

Allowing a license like this to stop reverse engineering/product evaluation is probably one of the worst things you can do to the software industry today. What if MS or Apple had done just that while releasing Windows/MacOS? Would the maker of any window manager that had window title bar, or a start menu, be sued for reverse engineering?

Spending two weeks reviewing the competition's product seems like a perfectly reasonable amount of time to learn its strengths and weaknesses. The only way to compete in an already established market is to build a better product than your competitors (cheaper/better/faster). How are we supposed to do that w/o being able to analyze the competitors' product?

Also, if reverse engineering can be banned, why try to patent anything? Patents eventually expire. A "trade secret" like, lets say, your basic UI design, that is only communicated to your customers after you've accepted the license, seems to me just as good protection as a patent, since anyone copying has broken your license, but offers no expiration date.

Hopefully the next time someone is set to court for something like this the result will be different. Reverse engineering is key to allow competition, the key principle to our economy. Undermine competition, and you are undermining one of the key foundations of our society. I just hope the next judge undestands that

Re:It's about time

[shepd]

>Reverse engineering is nothing more than the common theft of intelectual property.

Please show me how, when I draw a schematic diagram of my motherboard ABiT's intellectual property has been removed from their presence, never to be replaced, and has entered mine. Show me how they will no longer be able to manufacture this motherboard if I made duplicates, as they would no longer have the design for it. Show me how nVidia's design documents would be magically transported into my home if I should reverse engineer their nForce2 chipset.

Theft (in the sense you are using the word) cannot ocurr without a loss:

theft

\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.

Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

Next time, use the word steal. Then at least you can suggest reverse engineering that intellectual property was like "stealing a kiss" (which is never a bad thing, so if you were to rebut me as such, I'd leave it at that).

Either that, or get off the soap box and use the words people in a real court have to use: Violation of the right of the plaintiff to enjoy monopoly status on a copyrighted design or patent.

Anti Trust

[lllama]

I thought one of Microsoft's arguments in the anti-trust case was that competitors could always reverse engineer the Win APIs (I'm not MS bashing, I just can't think of any other cases).

Re:Could it be much worse

[arivanov]

Bollocks. Nothing to do with DMCA. Note the quote: Meeker noted that Baystate had reproduced a handful of errors in Bowers program. Kann, Baystate's lawyer, said all the errors came from Bowers' user interface, not the underlying code.. This sounds like theft to me. If you rev eng you usually find errors and fix them. If you copy without going through the effort of understanding how things work you get the errors copied as well.

Re:Errors replicated?

[stephanruby]

Seeing as Cisco is considered the industry leader, it was highly desirable to copy the Cisco CLI commands, down to the exact command syntax (where possible).

It's a good theory, but it's not applicable to this case. It's obvious from the article that the original programmer of this application wasn't the industry leader. May be there is another perfectly good explanation to copy his errors, but personally I just don't see it.

Re:It's what the consumers want.

[Twylite]

But to call something a "derivative work" simply because it makes use of some of the characters and ideas within someone else's work is sheer lunacy.

Put another way: I should be able to write a brand spanking new novel set in the Star Wars universe and involving some of the characters within it, without that novel being declared a "derivative work" and thus a violation of copyright. Why? Because I didn't copy anything except ideas.

Really? So you should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in your favour the huge success of JK Rowling's work to boost the acceptability and profit potential of your derivative? Do you really think JKR should have to suffer a loss of sales when someone reads your miserable derivative and decides that they don't really like Harry Potter?

So let's start with this: you have a completely wrong notion of what Copyright is intended to protect. Is is specifically intended to protect ideas, not a particular physical object in which they are captured. It is specifically intended to prevent anyone from copying your ideas so closely that they are confusingly similar to or even indistinguishable from the original work. It is specifically intended to protect the intellectual creations of a person from use (without permission) by any third party.

A character and a setting are VERY specific intellectual property or expressions. Although the fantasy and science fiction genres are HUGE, nearly every renowned work has immediately recognisable and distinguishable characters and settings. Middle Earth, Dune, Narnia, the Nautilus, Jedi, Discworld, Gandalf, Vimes, Paul Atreides - what makes you think that you can merely take the VAST amount of "development time" these authors spent on their creations and use it in a novel of your own?

You can prattle on about "should" and "shouldn't" all you like, but this IS the state of Copyright, this IS how it works, and in my not particularly humble opinion you are not only WRONG but a leech that doesn't understand the true source of value or just wants to sit on your arse and have society give you everything you deserve for being such a magnificent gift to this planet.