Legal Issues

CristinaCifuentes has collected some information on http://www.csee.uq.edu.au/~cristina/cal.html (now somewhat dated)

The ReengineeringForum organized a special session: see http://reengineer.org/legal/

This page considers the issues related to how lawmakers decide whether one program is derived from another.

Related to reverse engineering and the law is the issue of freedom: freedom to use and inspect software, artistic works, etc:

• Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture (on www.eAsylum.net) discusses issues such as copyright and whether it makes sense to grant exclusive rights to certain individuals and corporations for very long periods of time.
• Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, holds the view that all software should be free. See also FreeSoftware and the gnu.org philosophy page.
• For several books on these issues (perhaps somewhat out of date), see Andrew Schulman's bookstore page.

See also:

• UCITA, The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act
  • http://www.ucitaonline.com/
  • Licenses under this act usually include lines forbidding ReverseEngineering and DeCompilation.
• DMCA, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
  • http://anti-dmca.org/
  • http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf
  • http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/
• The Chilling Effects website.
• Cem Kaner's site at http://www.kaner.com, and also his page http://www.badsoftware.com.
• Norman Richards' ethics of decompilation , reverse engineering is not theft, and obfuscation hubris.
• The legality of decompilation