Abstract

     This daylong Conference convened by Professor Fitzgerald and Dr. Cifuentes was held at Santa Clara University School of Law, Santa Clara, California, on March 23, 2001. The Conference aimed to bring together leading technologists and lawyers, from across the globe, in order to better define and articulate technological reasons and legal principles for reverse engineering in the area of software.
     While the legality of the reverse engineering of software, within defined limits, has been firmly established in Europe and the United States since the early 1990s, a number of recent developments invite further discussion of the issue. Specifically, three issues are worthy of note: first, the growth of digital or software locks and the enactment of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the "DMCA") which raises civil and criminal liability for circumvention, and directly addresses circumvention devices in certain instances; second, the growing need to provide quality assurance through reverse engineering in the areas of security and error correction; third, the massive increase in software patents and the uncertain legal situation of the reverse engineering of patented software.
     In addition to these issues, the Conference posited the inherently discursive nature of digital property, in particular software, and the way in which digital property should be facilitated by reverse engineering to augment digital diversity.