would this guy be ok if someone 'reverse engineered' his email password. Every product wants to protect its IP in some sense...google won't like if someone reverse engineered their search ranking, apple won't obviously like if someone hacked the iphone to run android, intel won't like if someone was able to reverse engineer the chip design and then sell it for a tenth of the cost..heck would these guys like if I was able to hack their app and bypass the license check?

Certain internal software API's are as much intellectual property as is the physical hardware design.