Re:Reverse engineering (Score 1)

Whoa, my bad. I just read linuxbert's comment and had to dig back through a bunch of stuff to find references to the basis of the case.

Linuxbert is right, it is based on trade secrets. Protection here is based on obscurity.

There is also an allegation of copyright infringement in reverse engineering.

If it were patent protection, reverse engineering wouldn't prevent infringement.

Contrary to what linuxbert said, though, in the case of trade secret, a court might find that reverse engineering constitutes misappropriation of the trade secret, since the source code wasn't public and object code may not be considered public information since it's obscured.

AFAIK, reverse engineering as misappropriation of trade secrets has never been tested.

The plaintiffs don't have a leg to stand on with copyright infringement. Past decisions have held that reverse engineering copyrighted material for the purposes of ensuring compatibility constitute fair use. I could probably dig up the citations if anybody cares.