earticle

영어

The term ‘reverse engineering’ in the study herein indicates the behavior and process of apprehending the principle of development and of extracting the varied information, inclusive of the ideas and functional concepts at the computer program employed, by analyzing and investigating computer program in the form of object code through the disassembly and decompilation (of program codes particularly under the Korean copyright law), black box analysis with memory dump included, and manual analysis. Reverse engineering of a computer program, customarily carried out in the related industries, has served for interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, error correction, and program improvement, etc, so that it could contribute to fostering industrial development and associated computer program technologies. Whilst it took a considerable amount of time and money for the computer program development, the analysis by way of reverse engineering requires relatively less time and money to be undertaken, which seems to pose challenges on enterprises that develop a computer program. Therefore, they have tried to prevent reverse engineering by the copyright law and the contract. And as the reproduction and translation may take place in the disassembly and decompilation process, the subparagraph 34 of article 2 of the copyright law defined the act of decompilation of program codes as reproduction and translation, and so the article 101-4 permitted reverse engineering by restricting the author’s property right concerning the reproduction and translation. According to the subparagraph 34 of article 2, the decompilation of program codes is allowed solely for the purpose of obtaining the information necessary to achieve interoperability (compatibility under copyright law). In this article, two of the points in controversy relating to decompilation of program codes are that the term ‘interoperability’ should be substituted for the term ‘compatibility’ and how copyright law and monopoly regulation and fair trade act are applied to acts of computer program users or computer program authors in order to ensure the interoperability of computer programs. Therefore, this study looks further into both the meaning of compatibility and interoperability and the interpretations on compatibility and their problems in copyright law, and then into the scope of information required for interoperability, the need of reverse engineering required to gain information for interoperability coupled with its limitations and possible restrictions to be imposed upon under the monopoly regulation and fair trade act.