Legal Precedents on Copyrights

The conceptual separation between aesthetic and functional elements of an industrial product has made reverse engineering legally acceptable, as 

In the case of Microsoft Corp. v. Shuuwa System Trading K.K., the defendant (Shuuwa) decompiled the plaintiff s (Microsoft) basic interpreter into a form of source code and then published the results in a book that was commercially distributed. The book at issue is entitled PC-8001 Basic Source Program Listings and listed Shuuwa System Trading K.K. as the publisher. The Tokyo District Court found that this constituted infringement of the plaintiff s copyright, primarily because the defendant reproduced the plaintiff s entire source code in its published manual. 

federal court decision in the Saga Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc. case affirmed that decompilation of a software program was fair use. Two 

In the Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. case, the acceptance of reverse engineering was not an issue. However, the court decision pointed out that the fair use reproductions of a computer program must not exceed what is necessary to understand the improtected elements of the work. It 

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