Reverse engineering

[ollie lho]

On Tue, 2003-05-20 at 23:35, Steve Gehlbach wrote:
> ron minnich wrote:
> > On Tue, 20 May 2003, SONE Takeshi wrote: 
> >>Is it legal to disassemble the proprietary VGA BIOS to learn how to
> >>enable a particular VGA chip?
> > 
> > depends on what country you are in. I have no idea of the rules in Japan. 
> > We have avoided doing this type of thing in the US, because we have so 
> > many lawyers here looking for lawsuits to file. Even if it is legal we 
> > felt it was a bad idea. 
> > 
> 
> In America of course, anyone can sue anyone.  But it is my understanding 
> most lawyers agree reverse engineering is protected by the fair use 
> doctrine of Title 17, limited by Chap. 12 which is the DMCA.  In other 
> words, if it is encrypted, you have to be careful.  But I have never 
> seen anyone claim object code was "encrypted".  Anyway, I reverse 
> engineer all the time.  Highly recommend IDA from www.datarescue.com for 
> disassembly.
> 

If you are tracing the code with some kind of debugger rather than 
disassembly the binary image, does it matter if the image is encrypted ?

> 
> This is all American law, of course.  And, one should note, that even 
> though Connectix won, they went out of business due to legal expenses 
> (as far as I recall).  I think that is called being "dead right".
> 

If Connetix won, why can it ask Sony for the legal expense ? With
some additional "punishment" ?

-- 
ollie lho <ollie at sis.com.tw>