Re: [OT] RE: UDI and Free Software (fwd)

Tim Smith (tzs@tzs.net)
Fri, 9 Oct 1998 09:55:28 -0700 (PDT)


On 9 Oct 1998 ketil@ii.uib.no wrote:
> Since long. In USA, reverse engineering in order to discover ``trade
> secrets'' is apparently illegal. Laws vary elsewhere, in particular,
> the EU allows reverse engineering in order to find out how things work.

However, in the US, reverse engineering in order to discover interfaces
so you can interoperate with something has been approved in the court
cases I'm aware of, so provided one is careful (i.e., make sure what one
does corresponds to what the people who won those court cases did), it
should be possible to reverse engineer to discover interfaces.

--Tim Smith

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