On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 06:56 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
There was a court case where a company was using a copyrighted phrase for access control. A competitor won when they also used the same phrase for access control purposes.
That was a long time ago and people seemed to feel that when a customer bought something, they owned it. In today's environment that case might have gone differently.
Now, and long ago, buying something gave you the thing to use. It never made it legal/right for you to blatantly rip off the design.
i.e. Copyright and patents have been around for decades.
You've always been liable for a whole mess of legal trouble if you ripped off someone else's product. It's not a new problem.
Even if you do manage to get away with reverse engineering something that's not covered by a patent, or you find some loophole, you still stand the chance of getting your just deserts from the original manufacturer, when they, with their years of R&D into their product that they have, and you don't, trump your attempt with a new and better, or deliberately incompatible, model.