Reverse Engineering (Legal Question)

[EndianX]

Hi all,

I am looking in to buying a hand held radio scanner. It can be programmed via serial, but the software for it is proprietary and windows only. I want to write my own software for it, and preferably a reusable library that anybody can use.

They provide a document detailing the API, but it comes with several pages of licensing agreements which, as best I can tell, would prevent me from legally distributing any software I write using the control codes.

My question is, if I were to buy their software, reverse engineer it, and use that information to create my own software, can I legally distribute it? Can a company claim copyright on the control codes themselves?

Any information on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave

[Jonathan183]

I would try the equipment vendor ... and see if you can obtain the codes you require without reference to software. I doubt the software vendor will view a reverse engineer as acceptable. It would be better to obtain consent for use rather than trying to establish a legal defense.

[elija]

In the early days of the PC, One of the BIOS companies (I think
it was Phoenix) reversed engineered the IBM Bios by hooking
osilloscopes and what not up to a board with the chip in and
pumping signals in and measuring what came out.

They wrote their own code to replicate this without seeing a line
of the IBM code. This was perfectly legal. But there was no
licence agreement for it.

I'm sure the equipment vendor would love to open up the market
for their gizmo, so talk to them about your plans. The worst they
can do is hurt their potential sales by saying "piss off".

[bigtomrodney]

In Europe clean-room reverse engineering is legal. I can't speak for America but basically if you get one set of people to examine the device making notes of readings, outputs etc. the a seperate person/group can go about implementing the findings.

There needs to be a level of seperation to prevent any accusations of ripping off the product, to ensure you are implementing for operability and not just stealing what is in the device.

[bidi]

I remember reading a while ago, during the SCO case, that header files are not copyrightable. You might want to check into this. This was one of the things that cut the "thousands of line of codes" suit to just 300. Also, reverse engineering is acceptable anywhere, just ask the ReactOS guys.

Reverse engineering is acceptable under the law, the problem is how you go about it. Like I said, header files, for example, aren't copyrightable, so your header files can look exactly like theirs.

[oz]

It would be better to obtain consent for use rather than trying to establish a legal defense.

Yep, I agree!

[extremelinuxfan]

You would most likely see something like this directly stated in the license.

Disassemble or reverse engineering in any way is strictly forbidden

Something like this, besides they will be claimed copyright infringement, and perhaps they would have a patent on some ideas in this program.
For which they would "protect" their "discoverries" so you would in anyway need to either license with them in other to use any software and distribute it or anything like this.
I think a legal defense would be a hell of a bad idea and attacking this would be perhaps naive (not stupid, as it works sometimes)

But I would not suggest anybody to try to release something in this manner, to dangerious at least in the US.
I do not know about EU, here politicians start to implement different ideas to use patent systems, but never really came through, but it is only a matter of time before they actually might be doing this!.


Anyway if you were to only use the program yourself you could perhaps do something like this.
But since you might be eager to release you should really think about it.
In EU you can write something similar and that would not infringe their patents even if they would I don't think they would sue as there is no basis in the constitution of EU for it.

[SkittleLinux18]

I sure would like to reverse engineer Bill Gates....