[senko]

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

DMCA. The EULA likely prohibits reverse engineering. If a competitor does that, hit'em with lawyers.

Or, if you want to be able to sleep at night, recognize this as an opportunity instead of a threat.

[orthoxerox]

What about jurisdictions where reverse engineering is an inalienable right?

[dredmorbius]

Which are those?

[orthoxerox]

Afaik, the EU and Russia says that observing/experimenting with the external behavior of the program to determine its internal logic is legal.

Russia even allows to decompile object code if you have to solve private compatibility issues.

[jasomill]

Even in the US, are there any non-DRM examples where reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability in violation of a license agreement have been used as the basis for copyright claims, even when the results are incorporated into a competing product?

For example, I don't recall Microsoft ever being sued by WordPerfect or Lotus for reading and writing their applications' unpublished file formats, which wouldn't have necessarily involved disassembly or decompilation, but was still the result of reverse engineering that almost certainly involved using a licensed or unlicensed copy of the competitor's product.

[dredmorbius]

Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. is also a relevant case, I suspect. Found for Google against Oracle's claim of copyright infringement, for non-clean-room RE of Java APIs:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...>