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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

Someone I know worked for a tech company in the valley back in the eighties that made high end medical equipment. They caught an American and Japanese company trying to reverse engineer one of their products. End result was both companies were bared from that market for something like 15 years.

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This story is missing something, since reverse engineering is legal and done properly [1] gets you around copyrights and trade secrets. We're patents involved?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

My guess is corporate espionage. For them to get an injunction like this, they probably paid members of the engineering team to give them proprietary information.

You're going to have a hard time proving it was done properly, clean room, etc, when one of the heads of your department on the topic was a key engineer of the technology you are supposedly reverse engineering when he worked on it at the competitor who developed it.

I guess Uber wants us to believe that Lewandowski downloaded the files for some other purpose than using the information in the job he was going to start in a few days.

Flip side, he can't be barred from using his skills as long as you document clean room procedures.

Thanks, I have a knee-jerk reaction to "reverse engineering is illegal / a tort" statements without nuance.

Why is reverse engineering illegal (unless covered by a patent)?

My recollection is reverse engineering is legal, but it needs to be done carefully. Using staff that designed the "thing" you are trying to reverse engineer is not part of the doing it carefully bit...

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