Reverse Engineering in Science and War

In the United States, applying reverse engineering to understand your competitor’s latest device is totally logical. So long as you or your firm has obtained the device in a legitimate fashion, you are free to reverse engineer even a product retained by trade secrets.

Patents, on the other hand, demand a public disclosure of the design and its inner workings, so there is typically no need to reverse engineer the merchandise. Instead, they can simply study the patent in order to determine whether the product contains patent infractions or copyright infringements.

Reverse engineering was a method that was commonly used in World War II, in order to study how sophisticated the Germans were with their technologies and weapons. For example, both the British and the Americans noticed that the Germans had a superior design for their gasoline cans. So, as a result, they both reverse engineered the cans that were brought back from the troops. After that, they developed their own version of the superior gasoline cans, commonly known in the United States as the Jerry can.

China is another country that is known to use this practice to reverse engineer fighter planes, missiles and even HMMVVV cars from the West and Russia. The U.S.S.R. was known for having reversed-engineered a copy of the Taiwanese AIM-9 Sidewinder missile, that astonishingly hit a Chinese MiG-17 without exploding.

In many nations, including the United States, it is perfectly legal to reverse engineer an artifact or even a procedure that is protected by trade secrets, so long as the individual or party has obtained the object in a legal manner. When one seeks a patent, a public disclosure of the product’s inner workings is required, in order for others to examine it for patent infringements or copyright infractions.