Is reverse engineering affected by patent law?
Though software programs had generally not been granted patents in the past, more recently the U.S. Patent Office has granted patents for those programs that meet the patent requirements of usefulness (it must work and have an actual use), novelty (it must not have been previously known), and non-obviousness (it must not be an obvious invention to an ordinary person in that field). Due to the additional requirement that the specifications of the invention must be disclosede in the published version of a patent, reverse engineering is generally not necessary to discover the method or process necessary to the independent creation of that invention. However, many integrated systems contain many components, some of which may be patentable, which may implicate a reverse engineer in a patent infringement lawsuit. Since electronic products often contain many constituent parts, made by a number of different manufacturers, it would not be possible to figure out how the whole product works witho
