Reverse engineering of competitor’s software cost company big
This decision does not lie well with me.Of course, the competitor agreed not to reverse engineer the software - under the definition "attempting to produce a copy", they definitely did reverse engineer.But does that mean that re-implementing the same interface is reverse-engineering? That would be scary and terrible for competition.No software with a reverse-engineering clause could have a clone. Does Windows have one? If yes, Wine developers could not compare if a game works under Wine correctly.What about APIs? Is it forbidden for US citizens to create NVIDIA CUDA clones now? If someone found a way to reproduce some Photoshop image filter, is it forbidden to compare the resuls? MS Word-produced files?I really don't like where this is going. Thankfully, reverse engineering cannot be forbidden in the EU (unless I'm wrong).EDIT: I guess my main gripe is that if the owners of proprietary "standards" which achieved monopoly can effectively forbid any alternatives, cementing the monopolies.