Reverse engineering

[Steve Gehlbach]

ron minnich wrote:
> On Tue, 20 May 2003, SONE Takeshi wrote: 
>>Is it legal to disassemble the proprietary VGA BIOS to learn how to
>>enable a particular VGA chip?
> 
> depends on what country you are in. I have no idea of the rules in Japan. 
> We have avoided doing this type of thing in the US, because we have so 
> many lawyers here looking for lawsuits to file. Even if it is legal we 
> felt it was a bad idea. 
> 

In America of course, anyone can sue anyone.  But it is my understanding 
most lawyers agree reverse engineering is protected by the fair use 
doctrine of Title 17, limited by Chap. 12 which is the DMCA.  In other 
words, if it is encrypted, you have to be careful.  But I have never 
seen anyone claim object code was "encrypted".  Anyway, I reverse 
engineer all the time.  Highly recommend IDA from www.datarescue.com for 
disassembly.

(Note IANAL). The legal issue that came up in Sony vs. Connectix was the 
fact that in order to reverse engineer the Sony Playstation BIOS, 
Connectix had to copy the BIOS repeatedly to a variety of computers. 
The question was, was this unlawful copying of a copyrighted work. 
Ultimately the court found that the copying was "fair use" as long as it 
was "necessary" to create a non-infringing work.  The functional aspects 
of source/object code are not protected by copyright (that is the patent 
law area), only the specific expression.

This is all American law, of course.  And, one should note, that even 
though Connectix won, they went out of business due to legal expenses 
(as far as I recall).  I think that is called being "dead right".

-Steve