A key ruling last October by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, located in San Mateo, Calif., affecting the home video game sector is having a direct impact on the entire software industry. The ruling, which upholds engineers' rights to . . .
A key ruling last October by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, located in San Mateo, Calif., affecting the home video game sector is having a direct impact on the entire software industry. The ruling, which upholds engineers' rights to reverse-engineer other companies' proprietary hardware for purposes of research, flies in the face of federal legislation passed two years ago banning most forms of reverse engineering. The congressional ban -- part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) -- was intended as a measure to extend existing copyright law into the realm of software. But the Sony vs. Connectix ruling may present the legal loophole that software engineers need to justify other forms of reverse-engineering research, such as dissecting operating systems to enable anti-virus programs to detect irregular behavior by other programs.

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