“Mattel said that by reverse engineering CyberPatrol,
“developing source code and binaries to bypass” CyberPatrol’s
protections, and then posting the utilities on the Internet, the
programmers had violated Mattel’s copyrights and the terms of the
CyberPatrol license….”
“The first major case to examine the tension between
copyright law and reverse engineering of software was Sega
Enterprises v. Accolade. This case was a classic battle pitting two
computer game-maker competitors.“
“The facts are fairly straightforward. Sega said that Accolade
violated copyright law when it reverse-engineered Sega’s
proprietary game software. Accolade countered that it
reverse-engineered the software for the sole purpose of making
Accolade games interoperable with the Sega Genesis game
console….”
“The bottom line is that some narrow forms of software reverse
engineering can constitute “fair use” of copyrighted software.
Outside this narrow exception, however, copyright law acts as a
shield to protect software companies from the unauthorized reverse
engineering of their copyrighted works.”