> On 9 Oct 1998 ketil@ii.uib.no wrote:
> > Since long. In USA, reverse engineering in order to discover ``trade
> > secrets'' is apparently illegal. Laws vary elsewhere, in particular,
> > the EU allows reverse engineering in order to find out how things work.
>
> However, in the US, reverse engineering in order to discover interfaces
> so you can interoperate with something has been approved in the court
> cases I'm aware of, so provided one is careful (i.e., make sure what one
> does corresponds to what the people who won those court cases did), it
> should be possible to reverse engineer to discover interfaces.
Compaq did this in 1981 to produce a non-infringing pc bios. It has been
tested in the courts.
In compaqs case it involved two sets of engineers. One group disasembled
the bios and wrote a spec. The second coded up an interoperable product
from bare metal. They went to considerable lengths to asure that the group
writing the bios had no prior experience with the ibm pc.
joelja
> --Tim Smith
>
>
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Joel Jaeggli joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Academic User Services consult@gladstone.uoregon.edu
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It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of
arms. Karl Marx -- Introduction to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
the right, 1843.
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