Regarding Reverse Engineering

[Lenny]

Not neccessarily in asm or even programming, what is everyone's stand on reverse engineering in the field of engineering?

Does anyone know a person against it?

Any justification to be for or against it?

[Adron]

Be for it - Learn!

[hismajesty]

For it for educational purposes/personal level. Against it on the corporate level (for instance, like is done in the movie Paycheck)

[Lenny]

It some cases, reverse engineering in corporations is used because it's legal, it can get around some patent laws and copyrights.  The United States did alot of it during the cold war.

But what about intellectual property?  Could that fall under the justification of not supporting reverse engineering? 

[iago]

It depends on your motives, in my opinion.  I consider reverse engineering very similar to how I consider programming, at least for myself:
- Personal/Academic - Doing it to learn, not to damage, is fine and fun.  it's an interesting challenge with a lot of people to learn cool stuff
- For profit - Doing it to make money or something similar, I don't like.  It ruins the fun, and is probably quite illegal.

Of course, a job I would like to have in the future would be like a virus analyst -- take a virus or other piece of Malware and figure out how it works and what it does.  That involves reverse engineering, but is (I think?) legal.

Hmm, that brings up another question -- If there is a law against reverse engineering, would that apply to viruses and malware, making anti-virus corperations illegal? hmm...

[Lenny]

Well those things fall under the category of intellectual property, which is considered as tangible as any other kind of property.  So if there was a general law created, 'orignal' virii would have to fall under its protection also.  I'm not sure if variants of a virus would though.  It would be very funny in my opinion if a virus creator came out to sue for his intellectual property.

But reverse engineering is done by corporations because I think it is legal.  As I said before, it's used to get around alot of patent laws and copyrights.  Reverse engineering isn't limited to just ASM and decompiling.  I know that some companies use reverse engineering to avoid decompiling a program.  Wasn't that what FSGS claimed in their case with Blizzard?  That nothing was decompiled.  It was all done through packet logs.  I haven't looked much into the case, so correct me if I'm wrong.

[UserLoser.]

Well those things fall under the category of intellectual property, which is considered as tangible as any other kind of property.  So if there was a general law created, 'orignal' virii would have to fall under its protection also.  I'm not sure if variants of a virus would though.  It would be very funny in my opinion if a virus creator came out to sue for his intellectual property.

But reverse engineering is done by corporations because I think it is legal.  As I said before, it's used to get around alot of patent laws and copyrights.  Reverse engineering isn't limited to just ASM and decompiling.  I know that some companies use reverse engineering to avoid decompiling a program.  Wasn't that what FSGS claimed in their case with Blizzard?  That nothing was decompiled.  It was all done through packet logs.  I haven't looked much into the case, so correct me if I'm wrong.

They didn't decompile, they disassembled   I don't see how that can be bad, is opening game.dll in notepad bad and can blizzard sue you for it?

[tA-Kane]

iago's thoughts are quite harmonious with mine, at least for wanting to disassemble... don't disassemble for profit. Pro-end-user / anti-end-corporate!

Of course, that only goes for wanting to disassemble. If I were to build something which took me many months (or years) to create and am very proud of it, I would be extremely pissed if someone else were to come, see my product, reverse-engineer it, and then create their own rival product based on my work all in just a fraction of the time it took me to complete my project (or especially before I completed mine).

[Lenny]

Well you can take a little pleasure in the fact that in order for the person to reverse engineer your work, they would need a good understanding of it.  It's better than simply taking source code.

I agree that reversing and then distributing another's work under their own name is wrong, but what about distributing the concepts behind your work?  The ideas under your name?

I guess its really a question of whether or not you want anyone to know your trade secrets.

[tA-Kane]

I agree that reversing and then distributing another's work under their own name is wrong, but what about distributing the concepts behind your work? The ideas under your name?

Of course, everyone wouldn't want people to simply reverse engineer and then redistributing another's work under their own name.

What I'm talking about is what you mentiond second and third; reverse-engineering someone's product and then taking what you've learned to advance your own product... or worse, base your rival product off of.

It's like someone invented the wheel ... a unicycle. Then someone else looked at that, learned the secrets of the wheel, and then made a bicycle. Wouldn't the guy that made the unicycle be pissed off at the guy that made the bicycle, simply because the guy that made the unicycle had made his product first? And swap those, too. A guy invented a bicycle, then someone invented a unicycle based off of the design of the bicycle. The guy that made the bicycle should be pissed at the guy that made the unicycle because he used someone else's work without asking.

I most certainly would not be too happy if someone had based their work off of mine if I hadn't given them permission to do so. I would be even more pissed if they were to make more profit off of their (my) work than I do.

It's one thing to derive a product by asking questions directly (can I use your product for my own?) or even indirectly (how did you get X to do Y without Z happening?)... but to simply steal...? No, it's not right.

[Adron]

Patents are there to handle things like inventing the wheel. You get to get royalties and stuff, for a limited time. Makes a lot of sense. The only problem is with the amount of limited time - for things like computer programs, it would make more sense if patents were limited to a year or two.