Yeah, I'm not sure myself.

Generally, though, I think the situation has interesting parallels to piracy. Companies have many options on how to respond to unofficial use:

- cracking down on unofficial users == chasing down pirates

- attempting to control unofficial use (probably at the cost of normal usability) == DRM

- embracing unofficial users == the "piracy as free marketing" view

- viewing unofficial users as a sign of a specific weakness in the product == the "piracy as a service problem" view

I suppose that would make the original reverse engineer similar to someone who cracks a game's DRM?