> More specifically, defendant had argued on appeal that the lower court’s summary judgment on the breach of contract/reverse engineering claim was improper because the term “reverse engineering” in the license agreement was ambiguous. Plaintiff and defendant offered competing definitions for what they thought reverse engineering ought to mean. Defendant proposed a narrow definition – essentially, that reverse engineering must have as its objective the re-creation of source code. Plaintiff, however, offered a broader definition, encompassing other efforts to “analyze a product to learn the details of its design, construction, or production in order to produce a copy or improved version.”
(spoiler: court sides with plaintiff)
To what extent can a lawsuit be brought over a system that functions, for many inputs, in the same way as another, separate system? What's the difference between reverse engineering and plain old competition?
You can't, in general, bring a lawsuit based on "reverse engineering." This was a breach of contract lawsuit, where the contract prohibited "reverse engineering."
But what if I’m a new social network - do I have to hire engineers who aren’t on Facebook if they have no reverse engineering in their EULA? I’m worrried about it being yet another legal tool to bludgeon small companies with.
That's a good point. For products that "everyone" uses, it seems to give the companies behind those products more power. And further empowering larger companies to go after smaller ones doesn't seem like a good change.
No idea what the law actually says, but this seems like a job for the "obviousness" standard that we've also got in patent law (for better or worse). If you're poking at a product to figure out details about it that are "not obvious", and then you build a product with those same details, that's "reverse engineering".
In this case it does sound like they were trying to figure out API conventions, and not real engineering details, but that's just my cursory reading.
> More specifically, defendant had argued on appeal that the lower court’s summary judgment on the breach of contract/reverse engineering claim was improper because the term “reverse engineering” in the license agreement was ambiguous. Plaintiff and defendant offered competing definitions for what they thought reverse engineering ought to mean. Defendant proposed a narrow definition – essentially, that reverse engineering must have as its objective the re-creation of source code. Plaintiff, however, offered a broader definition, encompassing other efforts to “analyze a product to learn the details of its design, construction, or production in order to produce a copy or improved version.”
(spoiler: court sides with plaintiff)
To what extent can a lawsuit be brought over a system that functions, for many inputs, in the same way as another, separate system? What's the difference between reverse engineering and plain old competition?