So the Nintendo vs Tengen lawsuit, where Tengen a.k.a. Atari had been making their own games which Nintendo wanted to stop.
Nintendo won because Atari had copied their lockout chip to be able to run and they raised the case base on copyright and patents. But patents are for inventions, not circuit diseases like the lock-out chip. If I make a virus and then someone makes an anti-virus I shouldn’t then be able to win a patent battle against them for how their anti-virus infringed on my patent! The lock-out-chip is only malware.
One month after the decision, a similar ruling in Sega v. Accolade determined that reverse engineering was fair use. Several legal scholars have concluded that the main difference between the cases was that Atari had lied to obtain an unauthorized copy of Nintendo’s code.
A necessary solution to fight the problem.
Legal scholars have argued that reverse engineering has since been curtailed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000, upsetting the balance established in the Atari and Accolade cases.
What balance!? But yeah, it became even worse with that incredibly cruel law and our European “EUCD” equivalent.