Reverse engineering is 'presumptively legal'

Using reverse-engineering methods to find out about proprietary software is not illegal, rules a Californian court. A California appeals court on Friday reversed a four-year-old order barring the publication of a DVD-cracking tool on the Internet, finding the injunction violated the defendant's free speech rights. The case was closely watched as a test of how much protection companies can expect in California for trade secrets that become widely distributed online.

The plaintiff, the DVD Copy Control Association, had argued that Andrew Bunner violated its intellectual property rights by posting on the Internet code known as DeCSS that can be used to bypass Hollywood's encryption scheme for DVDs. Bunner's attorneys had countered that the code was no longer a secret by the time he posted it on his Web site.

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