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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.'"
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?
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.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.