This story is missing something, since reverse engineering is legal and done properly [1] gets you around copyrights and trade secrets. We're patents involved?
to extend on that idea, I'm fairly certain that a "clean-room" reverse engineering of a competitor's product HAS been shown to be legal. That is to say, as long as you can prove that the person(s) doing the reverse engineering didn't have any access to proprietary information about the workings of the product they were reverse engineering.
You aren't allowed to just read code and regurgitate it in order to claim it as your own. That is, just because you memorized this great new novel you read, it doesn't mean you can go and sit down and hammer it out and sell new copies. People go to great lengths to do this sort of things (see: clean room reverse engineering [1]) in order to try and wash themselves of liability.
Clean room reverse engineering is for the case where you want to translate source code to source code and prove that you didn't just copy and paste it. (It's pretty easy for two people to generate the exact same bytes of source code for any given algorithm. The documentation around clean room reverse engineering is to prove that you independently came up with the same thing. The code is copyrightable, the idea isn't.)
If you open up some chip and look at it under the microscope and translate the transistors you see into C code, that's not copyright infringement. (But it might be patented. Patents are super weird in that if you come up with an idea completely independently of someone else, and the other person patents it, you're not allowed to use the idea!)
If you assigned engineers to disassemble your competitor's product to figure out how it worked, you would put yourself at grave risk of patent suits if you let them use that knowledge in any way in developing your own products. There's a reason clean room design is used. With something mechanical like an engine, that means reverse engineering is probably not helpful enough to be worth doing.
That's clean room reverse engineering, a rigorous method to make absolutely sure that the results are legal so it can't be questioned later. It's not a legal requirement and it does not prevent lawsuits. It just makes it more likely that the legal battle will be won.
Is there any legal significance to "clean-room" reverse-engineering? I hear this term a lot from engineers who seem to think that they're entitled to claim ownership over distinct works created by people who read their source code (and in extreme cases their documentation or even disassembled binaries), but that's not how any other form of intellectual property works.
My recollection is reverse engineering is legal, but it needs to be done carefully. Using staff that designed the "thing" you are trying to reverse engineer is not part of the doing it carefully bit...
Reverse engineering for interoperability is protected with no routes to contest if done with a clean room reimplementation. If you physically own the item and are using it you are even more protected (think fixing your own tractor).
Unfortunately I think some lower courts have some messed up decisions or companies are trying to bully others with threats of suit. For example, some medical coding systems have copyrighted codes that are claimed to require a license and you can not install a system to cooperate with these. Except... this has already been decided, and you can.
Clean room reverse engineering is a valid protection against copyright claims. So as long as whoever drew the plans didn't know about the original they are safe. Even if the builder had a copy of their plans and gave whoever did the drawings leading instructions to get them to draw something similar to the original.
> Disassembling is incompatible with clean room reverse
> engineering
Not necessarily. The idea behind clean room development is that one part of the team uses whatever legal techniques they want to analyse software, and document everything they discover. The documents are checked to make sure they don't contain any copyrightable information from the original (if information is not copyrightable, the methods used to obtain that information, be it decompiling or analysis of behaviour don't matter). A different team, who hasn't seen the original software at all, work off the document that doesn't contain any copyrightable information from the original.
Depends on jurisdiction OP operates in, but clean room reverse engineering is one technique, i.e. OP reverse engineers a piece of software, documents how it works at a high level, and hands off the documentation to legal counsel who reviews it for IP infringement etc. The doc is then handed off to a completely different team/engineer who implements the API contract documented by OP.
Clean room reverse engineering is a thing because software copyright was a mistake and the judicial system understands it was a mistake. In software, it is regular and common for programmers to use licensed software libraries with defined interfaces. In writing or art, the notion of a "compatible interface" isn't really there. If you wrote a short fan story with Marvel characters and you want to liberate it from Disney's ownership, you have to redesign all the characters; you can't just argue that you need a superhero with red nanotech armor and a drinking problem in exactly this particular shape for compatibility.
I continue to wonder whether this can be legal at all. It's pretty clear they've been looking at the disassembled code, so it's not clean-room reverse-engineered.
Reverse engineering is an important right that is protected by centuries of patent and trade secret law in the US and many other countries. It's fundamental to innovation, even though non-innovative bad people like Theranos also do it.
Reverse engineering is not bad, and it is dismaying that someone posting on a site called "Hacker News" would think so.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
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