Are There Court Decisions That Illustrate Reverse Engineering As Either An Infringing Or A Non-Infringing Fair Use?
Here are some: In Sega Enterprises v. Accolade,1 the maker of a leading video game console (Sega Genesis) sued a video game publisher (Accolade) after the publisher reverse engineered the console in order to make compatible games. Accolade wired a decompiler to the console’s circuitry while loading three different, licensed games. It then compared the disassembled code in order to ascertain the interface specifications for the console. This information was then compiled in a written manual, which coders relied upon in developing Accolade’s own Genesis-compatible games. No Sega code was copied in Accolade’s games—the Accolade code was entirely original. Although Accolade initially lost in the district court, the Ninth Circuit ultimately found that Accolade’s “intermediate” copying (i.e., copying solely in order to discover functional interface specifications that were then independently implemented) was a fair use, emphasizing that disassembly was the only way to gain access to the idea
