Reverse engineering is not a crime

The law has more respect for trade secrets than it should, and companies have come to feel entitled to them. I respect intellectual property (even though I see it as a fundamentally broken institution in need of a major overhaul) but I don’t consider trade secrets a legitimate form of intellectual property as I do copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Patents, in particular, require disclosure of what is being patented and how it works.

If information about how technologies work is a secret, at some point society will devolve into a literal cargo cult. Reverse engineering, like deep linking, must not be a crime, or we are doomed to that fate.