Marcel Kilgus wrote: > [...] P.S.: For anybody who's interested, I found the (mainly) US view on reverse engineering expressed in the paper "The law & economics of reverse engineering", written by two professors of the University of Berkley (dated from 2001): http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~scotch/re.pdf
It's bit more complex in detail, but here's a sound-bite out of chapter A: "The legal right to reverse engineer a trade secret is so well-established that courts nor commentators have rarely perceived a need to explain the rationale for this doctrine." Concerning digital data and software, only copy protection mechanisms have been made illegal to reverse engineer by US congress in 1998 (the infamous DCMA). Interesting foot-note on page 47: "The European Union has declared that anti-decompilation clauses in software contracts are null and void. See European Software Directive, supra note 177, Art. 9(1)." I think I've never ever seen as many footnotes in a paper as in this one. 398 footnotes on 79 pages, that's an average of 5 per page! Truly amazing. Marcel _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
