Yes, reverse engineering is illegal, but is this reverse engineering?
Typically reverse engineering refers to stealing an actual idea\design off
someone. I would hazard a guess that you can't copyright a protocol only an
implementation of it, but this could be a grey area. It would seem to me you
can't copyright a input\output pair so therefore if you make a processing
unit that produces the same output to a given input through a different
process you haven't reverse engineered their product. If you could copyright
more than an imnplementation I would have thought Scenix would be in a lot
of trouble from MChip or AMD from Intel unless Intel\MChip were happy about
losing market share to compatible products.

Also, is reverse engineering implicitly prohibited? I know most software
agreements have a clause, but few pieces of hardware come with license
agreements.

Tom.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Blick [mailto:bblick@SABER.NET]
Sent: Friday, May 12, 2000 3:43 PM
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: [OT] When is a protocol proprietary?


You might want to check the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it made quite
a bit of reverse engineering illegal. Probably not applicable in your case.

Next up is UCITA, but so far only in Virginia. That makes reverse
engineering file formats illegal from what I hear(goodbye import filters!)

But is it wrong?

Cheers,

Bob

rot 13 my email xor with the first 20 letters of the king james bible and
run crypt to mail me.