The Legality Of Reverse Engineering And Legal Protection Mechanisms

Reverse engineering a term originated in the sixties of the last century, is obtained from publicly available sources (including hardware and computer software) through a variety of modern techniques to reverse the demolition, surveying, or decipher, analyze research and other technical means to obtain the relevant technical information of the performance parameters of the product, works or rights holders of operating information technology secret. Therefore, reverse engineering in the field of chemical and mechanical manufacturing, semiconductor integrated circuits and computer software, etc..At present, China’s legislative and judicial practice does not clearly define the legality of reverse engineering. Announced by the Supreme People’s Court in2007, the interpretation of a number of issues on the trial of the application of the law of unfair competition, civil cases (judicial interpretation of the provisions of Article12(2007)2) business secret through self-developed or reverse engineering, etc., not identified as the anti-unfair Competition Law section10(a),(b) provides that a violation of trade secrets. The term "reverse engineering" refers to products made publicly available through technical means to be demolished, mapping, analysis of the product technical information. Among the parties aware of others’ trade secrets by improper means, after reverse engineering the grounds advocated to obtain a legitimate act, not support it. At this point, our way of judicial interpretation to determine the reverse engineering behavior does not belong to the anti-unfair competition law violations of trade secrets, however, that judicial interpretation is not accurate and clear identification of "improper means", so definition of the problem about the legality of reverse engineering is still a hot issue for China’s legal theory research in the field.So far, reverse engineering legal issues remained mostly in the primary stage, the depth and systematic demonstration of reverse engineering legal issues is still rare, and are mainly concentrated in the field of computer software. Therefore, the study discusses the reverse engineering and related legal issues for intellectual property protection in China has far-reaching practical significance, and also has an extremely important role in promoting technology import in China to promote social and scientific progress. This article can be divided into three parts:Listed in the first chapter, elaborate on the definition of reverse engineering, implementation of the purpose and implementation process, as to their specific and detailed, comprehensive discussion of traditional legal analysis of reverse engineering to implementation of the behavior and the purpose of reverse engineering behavior, currently on reverse engineering the dispute of the legality of several point of view, to explore the significance of the existence of reverse engineering in order to build their legal theory.The second chapter, on this basis to explore reverse engineering and intellectual property related legal issues, the main aspects of reverse engineering and copyright, patent and other intellectual property protection, protection of trade secrets and unfair competition analysis by comparing the induction, value analysis, empirical research, case analysis and other methods to define the legality of reverse engineering.The third chapter, to examine the United States, Japan, EU and other major developed countries and relevant international treaties, international agreements for the implementation of the legislative status quo as well as judicial practice of reverse engineering behavior, combined with the current status quo of China’s legislation on reverse engineering as well as judicial practice for the future of reverse engineering the improvement of legal protection mechanisms put forward reasonable proposals.In short, the implementation of reverse engineering to obtain technical information is bound to experience a stage of economic development of countries in the world, countries also tend to be identified as one of the legitimate trade secrets, Therefore, start a discussion of legislation for our reverse engineering play a catalytic role.