Reverse engineering and the computing profession

Recent actions against reverse engineering threaten to remove this valuable practice from the computing profession's toolkit. Unless we develop better communication between the legal and computing professions, we will continue to suffer the consequences of legislation such as the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). By making the distribution of research results more difficult, such legislation stifles the sharing of ideas, causing an uncertainty that can lead to less innovation and fewer benefits to society.