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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?
Isn't this more of a issue of Look and Feel?
I also like how they say the GUI is a trade secret.
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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.
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.
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.
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.