Why is is that reverse engineering gets people cease and desist letters, especially in the software and electronics community? Is the difference that Ford keeps the findings internal and doesn't share them with the public? If so, that's pretty bad, because someone dissected a product and now everyone else should do the same instead of sharing the result. It's a waste of money and work force, all in the name of trying to hide stuff even though patents and copyrights are abused already for similar purposes.
It's not the act of disassembling that's important, it's what you do with the knowledge afterwards. For example, the team doing the Tesla teardown is now poisoned; they can write up their findings from the clean room and provide them to other engineering teams for implementation (IP issues aside), but they are now barred from working on any derivative technologies themselves. It's a bit cumbersome, but this is how engineering espionage is done.
Citation please. This is completely different from implementing a BIOS from a set of specs created from original source code.
To the degree there is protected IP, it would be covered by patents. Which are public. That's the point of a patent. And it doesn't matter if you were aware of the original art or not if you violate a patent.
If there are merely trade secrets/techniques that Tesla or anyone else simply hoped no one would be able to deduce but weren't otherwise protected, those are fair game.
Personal experience dealing with a team that reverse-engineered industrial hardware. They would acquire competitors' products and hand them off to teardown teams who weren't allowed direct communications with the rest of engineering. These strictures may have been a legal artifact of the company's significant background in software as well as hardware dev, or perhaps to deal with contractual issues, but they were firmly enforced.
So what does this mean for the career of one of these engineers? This sounds like a pretty ratty gig: take apart someone else's product, write up a report, and now you don't get to do any actual engineering of your own unless you quit and find a new job.
It makes me wonder how useful the information will be, since it'll likely be done by the worst engineers in the company. Why would a good engineer sign up for this job?
If it can be enforced in court (or has) it's most likely for a limited time, or you would pretty much preclude someone from applying what they've learned through investigation.
I'm not talking about legality (at least not directly), I'm talking about how working on this project will affect your career at this company. If the company puts you to work taking apart someone else's product and documenting it, but then relegates you to that role forever because they don't want you "contaminating" their IP with anything that might be patented, that means that you can never go back to an engineering development role at that company. You'll always be stuck just taking stuff apart and documenting it, and when you get tired of that, you'll have to quit and find yourself a new job at a different company.
So I'm questioning what kind of quality work you're going to get. It doesn't seem like top engineers are going to want to take that job, and in fact it'll probably be the bottom-of-the-barrel engineers who'll want this job because it's a stable paycheck and there's zero room for creativity or inventiveness. So what kind of results are you going to get, by not having really talented and knowledgeable engineers looking at it?
Okay, but I've seen my share of various engineers and different people are motivated by different things. That means, I know people who love taking things apart but don't really have much interest in building stuff from scratch. They love to take apart and modify mostly. And I wouldn't classify those I've met as lower-skilled.
Maybe, but I have a very hard time buying the idea that there's engineers out there who don't want to do any engineering, and just want to take things apart and document them, and are also very talented engineers.
I do realize that not all engineers want to do development: that's why we have test engineers. I've dealt with test engineers before; they're a special breed, and have a real talent for finding weaknesses and enjoy that challenge a lot. That's rather different than just disassembling something and documenting it. There's no challenge there, like there is in testing something to its breaking point and finding its weaknesses so you can make it better.
Comments
Why is is that reverse engineering gets people cease and desist letters, especially in the software and electronics community? Is the difference that Ford keeps the findings internal and doesn't share them with the public? If so, that's pretty bad, because someone dissected a product and now everyone else should do the same instead of sharing the result. It's a waste of money and work force, all in the name of trying to hide stuff even though patents and copyrights are abused already for similar purposes.
It's not the act of disassembling that's important, it's what you do with the knowledge afterwards. For example, the team doing the Tesla teardown is now poisoned; they can write up their findings from the clean room and provide them to other engineering teams for implementation (IP issues aside), but they are now barred from working on any derivative technologies themselves. It's a bit cumbersome, but this is how engineering espionage is done.
Citation please. This is completely different from implementing a BIOS from a set of specs created from original source code.
To the degree there is protected IP, it would be covered by patents. Which are public. That's the point of a patent. And it doesn't matter if you were aware of the original art or not if you violate a patent.
If there are merely trade secrets/techniques that Tesla or anyone else simply hoped no one would be able to deduce but weren't otherwise protected, those are fair game.
Personal experience dealing with a team that reverse-engineered industrial hardware. They would acquire competitors' products and hand them off to teardown teams who weren't allowed direct communications with the rest of engineering. These strictures may have been a legal artifact of the company's significant background in software as well as hardware dev, or perhaps to deal with contractual issues, but they were firmly enforced.
So what does this mean for the career of one of these engineers? This sounds like a pretty ratty gig: take apart someone else's product, write up a report, and now you don't get to do any actual engineering of your own unless you quit and find a new job.
It makes me wonder how useful the information will be, since it'll likely be done by the worst engineers in the company. Why would a good engineer sign up for this job?
If it can be enforced in court (or has) it's most likely for a limited time, or you would pretty much preclude someone from applying what they've learned through investigation.
I'm not talking about legality (at least not directly), I'm talking about how working on this project will affect your career at this company. If the company puts you to work taking apart someone else's product and documenting it, but then relegates you to that role forever because they don't want you "contaminating" their IP with anything that might be patented, that means that you can never go back to an engineering development role at that company. You'll always be stuck just taking stuff apart and documenting it, and when you get tired of that, you'll have to quit and find yourself a new job at a different company.
So I'm questioning what kind of quality work you're going to get. It doesn't seem like top engineers are going to want to take that job, and in fact it'll probably be the bottom-of-the-barrel engineers who'll want this job because it's a stable paycheck and there's zero room for creativity or inventiveness. So what kind of results are you going to get, by not having really talented and knowledgeable engineers looking at it?
Okay, but I've seen my share of various engineers and different people are motivated by different things. That means, I know people who love taking things apart but don't really have much interest in building stuff from scratch. They love to take apart and modify mostly. And I wouldn't classify those I've met as lower-skilled.
Maybe, but I have a very hard time buying the idea that there's engineers out there who don't want to do any engineering, and just want to take things apart and document them, and are also very talented engineers.
I do realize that not all engineers want to do development: that's why we have test engineers. I've dealt with test engineers before; they're a special breed, and have a real talent for finding weaknesses and enjoy that challenge a lot. That's rather different than just disassembling something and documenting it. There's no challenge there, like there is in testing something to its breaking point and finding its weaknesses so you can make it better.
Why can't they work themself on derivatives? As long as there aren't any patents it should be ok? What am I missing ?
There are patents.
Patents are public information. That's one of the main reasons they exist. (Making information public in exchange for period of exclusivity.)
There are patent/IP concerns all over the place.
This would be a form of white box reverse engineering.