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Reverse Engineering is Illegal via DMCA (#1082)
Posted: 4/10/2003; 4:17 PM by Terry Frazier
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According to this InfoWorld article U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns has thrown out a preemptive lawsuit that would have protected the reverse engineering research of Benjamin Edelman, a student fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Nothing new here, nothing unexpected. But I have to ask -- just where would we be if all those engineers who founded AMD, Cyrix, Cypress, and others had been imprisoned or driven to bankruptcy for reverse engineering the x86 architecture?

Would the PC revolution have spread so far, so fast? The last time I looked Intel had a $100+ billion market capitalization, $26 billion in net revenues, and $3+ billion in net income. They certainly don't seem to have suffered from competitive reverse engineering. Certainly, they had to work harder to stay ahead, but that's what capitalism and competition is about. It is not about buying off lawmakers to put your competition in jail.

Had the DMCA been in effect 20 years ago there would be no PC revolution, and the losers would have been the users, buyers, and individuals -- the same groups being damaged today by the DMCA.

Judge dismisses DMCA challenge. Reverse-engineering not protected [InfoWorld: Top News]
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