I'd like to hear a lawyer's perspective on how the modern legal climate would have applied to historical events, especially Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS which enabled them to create PC clones.
I'm not an attorney yet (another year), but I can give you a little more insight to that question, specifically. Absent a patent on the technology, reverse engineering is a completely acceptable way to learn the underlying facts and algorithms used in a technology. This was particularly evidenced in Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. v. Connectix (http://web.archive.org/web/20070228070634/http://www.ca9.usc...), where Connectix created an emulator and Sony sued, alleging that the BIOS had been transiently copied (thus violating copyright law) in order for Connectix to emulate Sony's systems.
The key to this case was that Connectix had exhausted all other methods before resorting to reverse engineering; Connectix contended that direct disassembly was necessary, because they had no other way to learn the non-copyrightable facts and algorithms.
The holding in the case was that Sony's copyrighted material did not deserve as much protection, because it contained unprotected aspects that could not be examined without copying. This is why Sony's BIOS was accorded a lower degree of protection than more traditional literary/musical/creative works.
Keep in mind, Connectix was a 1999 case. DMCA implemented two 1996 WIPO treaties, and became effective in 1998. I've read through nearly all of the DMCA, and everything in the opinion comports with the sections of the US Code that the DMCA amended. This is probably the best case that illustrates reverse engineering.
A more relevant question perhaps: is there a substantially different impact between careful clean room reverse engineering and simple hacking with public disclosure?
