A Critical Study of Iran Copyright Law on the Reverse Engineering of Software as an Exception to the Author’s Economic Rights with Comparative Survey on European Community Directive

According to the general rules of the world copyright system, software decompiling should be considered as the infringement of the author’s copyright, since it requires reproduction, adaptation or translation of the original work that needs permission from the author. However, due to the need of other software developer to create compatible programs and necessity of their decompiling in order to discover the software know-how for producing compliment or compatible computer programs by them, EC Directive 1991 on the Legal Protection of Computer Programs and pursuant to it, the national European laws have permitted the software decompiling under the special conditions. Moreover, new Copyright Bill of Iran (1393) under the influence of the Directive has considered the software decompiling as one of the exceptions to the economic rights of the software developers. Nevertheless, the Bill has ignored many of the conditions stipulated in the Directive. This research, by conceptual-analytical method, firstly has done some analysis for the compilation concept, then it has compared critically all of the conditions mentioned in the Draft with their equivalents in the Bill, and has described all provisions related to the software decompiling in the Copyright & Related Right Bill and has specified all of the problems exist in the Bill, and finally has provided some revisory suggestions for the Iranian Legislative.