Judicial Support for Reverse Engineering

In Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, 489 U.S. 141, 146 (1989), Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated:

From their inception, the federal patent laws have embodied a careful balance between the need to promote innovation and the recognition that imitation and refinement through imitation are both necessary to invention itself and the very lifeblood of a competitive economy. The novelty and nonobviousness requirements of patentability embody a congressional understanding, implicit in the patent clause itself, that free exploitation of ideas will be the rule, to which the federal protection of a patent is the exception.

The public at large remains free to discover and exploit the trade secrets through reverse engineering of products in the public domain or by independent development ' Reverse engineering of chemical and mechanical articles in the public domain often leads to significant advances in technology.

The competitive reality of reverse engineering may act as a spur to the inventor creating an incentive to develop inventions which meet the rigorous requirements of patentability.

Reverse engineering is widely accepted in industry as a means for companies to obtain competitive intelligence. Nearly every large, successful corporation in the world uses reverse engineering in these two important ways: as a tool for competitive analysis and as a means to uncover possible patent infringements. What companies do with the information gathered from reverse engineering is the determining legal factor.