Volume 6 Issue 2

Reverse Engineering of Computer Programs: Comments on the Copyright Law Review Committee's Final Report on Computer Software Protection

Cristina Cifuentes (1) and Anne Fitzgerald (2)

The Final Report on Computer Software Protection submitted by the Copyright Law Review Committee to the Australian Government in April 1995, includes recommendations on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation and Disassembly of computer programs. This paper comments upon the relevance of these recommendations to the computer science community, and considers the recommendations in the light of the EU Directive on the Legal Protection of Computer Software and recent US cases.

2 LL.B.(Hons)(Tas.), LL.M.(Lond.), LL.M.(Columbia)
Lecturer, Law School, University of Tasmania (anne.fitzgerald@law.utas.edu.au)