In the United States and many other countries, products or manufacturing methods are protected by trade secrets, and reverse engineering can be performed as long as the products or manufacturing methods are reasonably obtained. A patent requires public disclosure of your invention, so it can be researched without reverse engineering. One motivation for reverse engineering is to determine whether a competitor's product infringes a patent or infringes a copyright.
Reverse engineering of software or hardware systems for the purpose of interoperability (for example, to support undisclosed file formats or hardware peripherals) is considered legal, although patent holders often object and Attempts to suppress reverse engineering of their products for any purpose.
In order to obtain the ideas and functional elements implicit in a copyrighted computer program and there is a legal reason to obtain it, when the only method is disassembly, according to the law, disassembly is a right to the copyrighted computer program. Fair Use of Copyrighted Works.
On January 17, 2007, the Supreme People's Court of China issued the "Interpretations on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in the Trial of Civil Cases of Unfair Competition", which clearly stipulated for the first time: Trade secrets are not deemed to be infringement of trade secrets as stipulated in the relevant provisions of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. That is, obtaining trade secrets through self-research and development or reverse engineering is not an act of unfair competition, and reverse engineering is officially justified.