The Law and Reverse Engineering

Almost all software contracts that are not open-source contain broad bans on reverse engineering, but as far as we can tell, almost all professional software development does reverse engineering to some degree. This is a fundamental, unresolved conflict. Every student and practitioner of software of engineering will face reverse engineering issues and they will have to make their own decisions about what is fair and reasonable in their situation, what risks they are willing to accept, and what corporate policies they should follow, support, or challenge. The industry is polarized and it will probably be a decade or more before the next generation of leadership revisits this conflict in a constructive way. For now, the statutes and the courts offer insufficient guidance. We plan to highlight the the issues of the law and reverse engineering through examples. Each exemplar case will be drawn either from an actual lawsuit or from a technical advance in reverse engineering. Rather than telling participants what to do, we will lay out the factors that we think they should consider.