At 12:41 AM 5/29/98 -0000, you wrote:
>Here we encounter the difference between law and ethics.  The situation you
>describe is not inherently unlawful.  Different people will have varying
>opinions on whether it is unethical.
>
>US law does not prohibit reverse-engineering in the sense you describe.  It
>only prohibits manufacture and sale of a product derived in this manner in
>three cases:

I think I remember a case where this reverse engineering was done and
upheld by the US courts.  Compaq got a group of engineers to "reverse
engineer" the IBM BIOS chips.  These engineers then wrote a spec for the
chip.  A different set of engineers without any knowledge of the details
discovered in the reverse engineering process developed an equivalent chip
from the spec.  The court ruled that Compaq did not break the law.  It
seems to me that the same rules can be applied to my products that are
applied to IBM's products (and I can't afford to fight them in court).  The
fact is, that nothing is really secure and the only defence we have is to
make it as hard as possible to reverse engineer the device.

Norm