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.

Since the advent of the semiconductor, legislation has modernized the nature of copyright and intellectual property protection, clarified the meaning of 'fair use' in a digital age, and provided support for legitimate reverse engineering activities.