Hacker's Rights (or lack thereof)

[GliderPro]

I was forwarded this link yesterday and it contains very good information about the legal ramifications of reverse engineering. It isn't meant to scare anyone but if you live in the US and your are thinking about publishing your work give it a read.

Coders’ Rights Project Reverse Engineering FAQ | Electronic Frontier Foundation

[Cypher]

Another FAQ with the most relevant question linked:
FAQ about Reverse Engineering -- Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

Honestly though, if you're at the point where you're worried about your project, do what the ROS/Wine/etc developers do and use clean-room design.
Clean room design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[amadmonk]

The reality of the legal situation is insanely complex, as the links show.

Bottom line: if you don't want to get sued, don't release your code, and don't -- for the love of god -- sell your code. Generally speaking, non-commercial uses often fall into "research" exemptions, so in the unlikely event that you ever end up in court for the code that you never sold, you can claim that you were just "researching" game mechanics and have some hope of getting off.

The reality is that non-commercial code simply isn't on the radar for a company like Blizzard for a LOT of reasons (hard to find a liable target, hard to shoot down fair use claims, and so on). This doesn't mean you're immune -- sadly, you're only ever as innocent as a judge says you are, and often the judges are more likely to side with Multi Billion Dollar-corp, LLC, than they are with al33tN3th4xx0r.

This is not the way it should be, but it's the way it is. Reverse engineering for non-commercial ventures should be completely legal, unless the goal is actually the circumvention of DRM (and DRM should only prohibit copying a source file, not RE, although in practice it's hard to separate the two aspects). Selling a program that only exists to leech off of another, copyrighted program, is probably legally questionable at best (in both spirit and letter of the law).

Frankly, DMCA and software patents (and, to a lesser extent, copyright) are being used to squash legitimate freedom of innovation and research. The law needs to change, but since everyone thinks RE's are crooks and the IP owners are saints and angels (who incidentally contribute huge sums of lobbying dollars), I don't see it changing soon.

We need real fair use.

[Apoc]

As the US becomes more, and more, run by the big corporations, and those with money, anybody who has any innovative ideas will be shot down long enough for the corporation to steal it, or quell the innovator.

It's sad to see just how far people will go for a few bucks.

[amadmonk]

Amen. (plus some extra characters to hit the min char limit)