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When I bought my cyclocomputer from CatEye I have no right to the software that powers the device, it is the intellectual property of CatEye, so I think it is not likely the DMCA will impact or slow the IoT market place. Users of IoT devices have no rights to hack the software powering the device.
But shouldn't we ? If you buy a car don't you expect to be able to work on it yourself ? Shouldn't we have the same rights for other 'things' we buy as long we don't pirate ? And with pirating I mean distributing and/or selling someone elses IP without approval. I personally have problems with buying things but not owning them.
Besides I think this statement is also much USA centered, I think you get more rights in certain European countries like Germany etc. Although USA is trying to force their IP view on the world during negotiations like TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership).
Car customizers like AMG have to reverse engineer the software programming on the engine control units, because Mercedes isn't going to hand over their intellectual property and let just anyone modify how gas gets delivered to the engine.
1999 actually. And a decade before that Mercedes itself was their largest customer. Not sure when their first electronic injection was but I'm sure they had the code.
Car customizers like AMG have to reverse engineer the software programming on the engine control units, because Mercedes isn't going to hand over their intellectual property and let just anyone modify how gas gets delivered to the engine.
The difference is that Merc didn't sue AMG for reverse engineering their code and making a better product.
I worked for Chips & Technologies in the 80's. We reverse engineered IBM chips by de-layering them; we reverse engineered BIOS by de-compiling them. Detailed specs (very detailed) were written from the reverse engineering (that was the "dirty" side.) Folks in the "clean" room designed chips and wrote SW based on the specs, having never looked at the original chip or code. It was widely done and legal. The entire PC industry sprouted from such efforts.
Today, all of that is illegal. And it's not just illegal to reverse engineer and sell a competitive product, its illegal to even look under the hood. For any reason.
Where would cars, or computers, or any of the other things we take for granted, be today if Henry Ford had gotten legislation passed to make it illegal to disassemble a Model-T or make any after market part?
In Europe it's totally legal to "look under the hood", and indeed you can produce something using that information if you wish to connect to a system, but you cannot reproduce the original system for commercial gain. This was of course the legal basis that forced Microsoft to open up all the Windows APIs to allow Linux Wine to be created.
The exemption in the US isn't quite so wide but I think what Chipworks do is still allowable and if it wasn't they'd just get it done in Europe.
In any case there's a Chinese company that goes far further than Chipworks, producing photos of every layer of a chip so you can see exactly what is there. Under Chinese law what they do is legal, although one wonders what the information is used for by others.
Reverse engineering applies primarily to gaining understanding of a process or artifact, where the manner of its construction, use, or internal processes is not made clear by its creator.
Patented items do not of themselves have to be reverse-engineered to be studied, since the essence of a patent is that the inventor provides detailed public disclosure themselves, and in return receives legal protection of the invention involved. However, an item produced under one or more patents could also include other technology that is not patented and not disclosed.
Indeed, one common motivation of reverse engineering is to determine whether a competitor's product contains patent infringements or copyright infringements
Patent law has its problems, but copyright in the US is really bad, thanks to Disney which got it extended to a ridiclulous amount of time that really inhibits innovation. It just shows progress is as much about politics as it is about knowledge. I believe in the production process a combination of patents on some key sections and secrecy kept in a tight group on other sections is best protection. If the technology is truely ground breaking and innovative, this is probably the best protection.
When I worked at Intel we would intentionally place dummy polygons into each IC layout that had no electrical purpose but as markers, so that if someone copied that layout we would know conclusively that it was either stolen or reverse-engineered. Only countries with strong intellectual property laws could enforce litigation against the copiers.
There's a Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984, according to Wikipedia, where on the IC layout there is a mark, Ⓜ .
