Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
That's when I would start to get REALLY worried about "reverse engineering".
So they play with the finished product and copy what they see (roughly) -> fine, as long as you don't violate anything protected by patents. No clause in a EULA could be upheld that would prevent that. It has nothing to do with what can be put in a EULA, but rather, what can be determined as permissible in such an off-hand context.
But to have errors duplicated in the system: I assure you would not be duplicated in a UI unless the coders copied the exact methods behind the UI. Hence they have legitimate claims that there is something fishy going on.
There's matching behavior, and then reimplementing without first understanding. The latter is 1) irresponsible 2) lazy, 3) contemptable, and those that practice should not be protected by reverse-engineering rights. I claim that shouldn't be called reverse-engineering, but something else.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Isn't this more of a issue of Look and Feel?
I also like how they say the GUI is a trade secret.
(appended to the end of comments you post)
I'm all in favour of that!
Before running this VIRUS you must accept the terms of our End User Licence agreement.
[Accept] [Decline]
What if someone slaps a EULA on a virus, and then sues anti-virus researchers?
Well, so far M$'s legal department has the first half covered. Rumour has it that they are backing SCO in attempt at the other half.
At the rate we're going, Ford won't be allowed to take apart Chevys to see how they work... McDonald's employees will be jailed when they eat at Burger King... and software engineers who look at competitor's interfaces will be blinded with hot irons.
When I was a programmer in Computer Science 101, someone copied one of my programs, and I was accused of cheating. When I went to talk to the professor about it, I confessed that I had helped another student explaining that I told him how to get a particular graphic to work properly. He replied that in that instance, I had done nothing wrong that algorithms are free to share. I was absolved (the plagiarism was different).
But I still think algorithms should be public domain! If you own a company, and you have a particularly cool algorithm you want to hide, you should have to either obfuscate or encrypt the machine code. There is absolutely no reason that algorithms should be protected IP.
Computer Science is a weird mixture of science and engineering. A lot of the theoretical and some of the applied work is very scientific, while most systems work is very much engineering. Scientific discoveries are not generally patentable, inventions are.
The compromise I propose is this: allow source code to be copyrighted, but deny the patentabilty of algorithms. As anyone who has programed knows, even with a detailed algorithm and specification, there still is a lot of engineering required to complete a finished product. That engineering work would still be protected.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Bowers had offered to work with Baystate in the late '80s, but the company had rejected his offers [...] Baystate also pressured CAD software company Cadkey not to distribute Bowers' product, and later, Baystate purchased Cadkey and shut Bowers out of the market [...]
This sounds familiar; Find your biggest competitor, buy out their potential investors & then 'borrow' their technology. I do feel sorry for Bowers in all this! He mortgaged his house 10 years ago to fund the marketing of his software & he still hasn't received a dime from Baystate.
Meeker noted that Baystate had reproduced a handful of errors in Bowers program
Yup, that's a problem. It's hard to rationalize something like that... then again, judges aren't always tech savvy & they have been convinced that software DVD decoders must digitally copy a DVD in order to play it, thereby making DVD playback on a PC illegal. I'm sure Baystate's lawyers tried to argue that in making a 'similar' GUI to Bower's program, they ran into the same bugs by accident - or by design - or something else just as ludicrous.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism; But decompiling your competitor's software is not the same as merely using ideas that seem to work well for your competitor.
I can see one way companies might get around this is to encrypt the software, and have decryption initiated by the 'I agree' button. The DMCA would then be invoked against anyone who wrote their own installation program. Even then, is it cut and dried whether an alternative installation system is covered by the DMCA?
Is installing a piece of software one has just bought an act of copyright circumvention? You're not circumventing copyright, just the contract the author has attached. One could argue that you can't use a work without agreeing to the author's contract, but hasn't the author already made a contract with you by accepting your money?
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?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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
To atone for your sins, you need to take a cue from Senator Hatch and physically destroy your machine. Now.
When yo look at someone's compiled code, you are seeing that which you were not meant to see.
What is it that you are not meant to see? The are distributing it, and yet they dont want you to see it?
Tim, while i can see you are trying to express something here, I think you need to get some more fully formed thoughts out.
Lets begin, you claim companies have NDAs to prevent people from seeing their 'code'. I can only assume you mean source code, as when you send a product out the door everyone gets to see the object code. Now if a competitor is disassembling a product they not only (usually) haven't seen the code but aren't under NDA. So the point is moot.
As for theft, well this is a really different thing than what is generally termed 'reverse engineering' If they were 'pure theft' they would change all the names and release it as their own product (which sadly does happen). However R.E. is meant to dissect the inner workings as to recreate the 'black box' if you will. This has been decided to be legal a bunch of times.. please see Compaq vs IBM (PC bios) and Connectix vs sony (playstation emulator).
Technically speaking yes.. disassembly would be 'for their own benefit', the benefit of making a compatible system. Familiarity with the terms it really vital here.
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
>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.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Even though Bower's won the case in part on the premise that Baystate broke the EULA and reverse engineered his CAD template system, it seems the more important issue is that Baystate was found guilty of infringing on Bower's 1990 patent. It only served to bolster the patent infringement case and gain the sympathy of the court that Baystate apparently ignored the EULA and set out to purposely reverse engineer the "trade secrets" in Bower's product.
However, if the patent didn't exist would Bower's have ultimately won this case based purely on the reverse engineering clauses in the EULA? I suspect not.
It seems that this case doesn't seem to offer a good precedent for preventing the common practice of reverse engineering through a EULA because so much of it is tied up in the patent infringement aspects of the case. Also, the article makes it seem that Baystate so closely copied the UI that they could have infringed copyrights as well which only serves to make the case even more ambiguous with regards to reverse engineering.
It would be more interesting if these other aspects of the case didn't exist and Bower's had simply tried to sue Baystate on the fact they violated the EULA by having two weeks of reverse engineering his product in their development schedule -- even if he couldn't point to specific trade secrets of his being used by Baystate in their product.
Therefore, I doubt this case will even put a dent in the common practice of reverse engineering competitors products.
BTW, IANAL so don't sue me if you get sued.
The IEEE USA is pursuing this:
* Press release regarding Baystate v Bowers:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/releases/2003/060
* Details of the amicus curiae, etc:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/forum/policy/2003/Ba
* General position on reverse engineering:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/forum/POSITI
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).
There are international agreements that imply allowance of reverse engineering. The US is a signatory to these.
s _e/t_agm 3_e.htm]
/ 94dc.htm ]
0 1_2_57_29_PM_Indlaw/article.pdf]
e .html]
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/trip
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
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_20
* "Reverse Engineering Clauses in Current Shrinkwrap and Clickwrap Contracts" [http://www.cptech.org/ecom/ucita/licenses/revers
* "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]
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/
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.
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.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Reverse engineering is nothing more than the common theft of intelectual property.
Here in Australia, reverse engineering of software is actually my legal right.
The only reason the competitor could possibly have for dissassembling the binary code would be to copy it for their own benefit.
Absolutely. And to be honest, why not? Fixing your software bugs (because you won't) and improving the interoperability of my software (with yours) are definitely for my benefit.
In regard to the wider issue, the courts here in Australia would by no means automatically agree to the legality of an EULA that placed 'undue restrictions' on my common law right, especially when those restrictions can be seen to be anti-competative. In this particular case however, after having read the article and assuming that the information given was accurate, I think the American courts made the right decision. To be honest, this actually appears to be more an issue of software component theft (exact reproduction of errors in a UI?), than one of reverse engineering.