You're going to have a hard time proving it was done properly, clean room, etc, when one of the heads of your department on the topic was a key engineer of the technology you are supposedly reverse engineering when he worked on it at the competitor who developed it.
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.
I feel like "grandpa is gonna talk", and I'm not even that old. But "when I grew up", "reverse engineering" was still explained as an incredibly hard thing, infinitely harder than just engineering. It was said to be where one team would go into a room with a device, send out a spec, that a different team would then take to implement, they'd never meet, the implementing team would never get to see or touch the original device (pretty much what someone in a sibling thread described as their own experience, rather than me just hearing this being explained). With all that in mind, I'd say that WPL (the defendant) pretty much missed the whole point of reverse engineering...
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.
Instead of addressing the substance of my argument you are instead attacking my familiarity with the particulars of the the tools and techniques used to do contemporary reverse engineering. This is a logical fallacy known as the Courtier's Reply:
I'm talking about a group of people breaking into the storage area and spending the night examining and measuring foreign technology. That's not how licensing works. That's how reverse-engineering works.
Yeah, reverse engineer the end product. You can't have one guy in the office looking at leaked code writing up detailed specs of how the code works and then giving that to someone to write.
I mean, isn't the post you replied to essentially the clean room approach? One person/group does the actual reverse engineering and writes up the spec doc, and then a totally separate person/group takes that spec doc and produces code to implement it.
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