Legal Aspects of Reverse Engineering

The term “reverse engineering” refers to the process of discovering a device, object, or system through analysis of its structure, function, and operation. Reverse engineering has its origins in the analysis of hardware for military equipments. Since this science may be used for re-production of a device or system, many legal issues come up from the view of intellectual property, economic and competition law which should be considered. This paper is discussing the concept, advantages, disadvantages and other aspects of reverse engineering from a comparative legal perspective. In Iran there are different statutes about the protection of software, copyright and industrial properties usable for finding legal rule of responsibility for reverse engineering and its exceptions. In this paper I have considered these subjects with a comparative survey on the law and case law of US and UK.