Anti-Circumvention Rules Limit Reverse Engineering

Until the U.S. Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, reverse engineering of computer programs and other digital works was widely regarded as lawful in the U.S. The DMCA changed the law because the entertainment industry feared clever hackers could and would bypass technical protection measures (TPMs) that the industry planned to use to protect their copyrighted works from unauthorized copying and dissemination. The industry persuaded Congress to make it illegal to circumvent TPMs and to make or offer circumvention tools to the public.

Circumvention of TPMs is, of course, a form of reverse engineering. This activity is now illegal not only in the U.S., but also in most of the rest of the world unless there is a special exception that permits circumvention-reverse engineering for specific purposes under specific conditions. The DMCA rules, for instance, include exceptions for law enforcement, intelligence, and national security purposes, for making software interoperable, and for encryption and computer security research under certain conditions.