No. Why would that be the case?

IANAL, but IIRC, it's perfectly legal to read and study the competitor's product's code, as long as you don't copy it verbatim.

You might like it or not, this is the case. There are other ways to protect your intellectual property, in US you can patent an algorithm or a piece of code, if you like.

Also, there are perfectly legal reasons to read and study a competitor's product's code, for example to establish whether they committed copyright infringement or not.

Moreover, the world is NOT just an appendix on the U.S., whether you like it or not (and, Andy, you are supposed to be among those who DON'T like it ;-) )...

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Since the times I am paid for embedded programming, I am trying to study these things - read protection and stuff. My first commercial program was stolen within a month and the competitor who stole it exhibited the product in the next booth to us on a local exhibition. They even did not bother to change the fonts on the photocopied texts. They knew very well that we could take no practical legal steps in these countries in those times (and I doubt we could nowadays - it takes too long to get a case to the court, which then takes even more to get to a final decision (several years, even decade sometimes, and there is little legal enforcement even if one wins a case). So the only way how to protect our IP is to use as much of the copy protection the chips offer as possible.

So, I NEED to know everything about copy protection, lock bits etc., to protect MY locked code and stuff. Also, I would like to see bigger pressure exerted to the manufacturers to move the "safer" technologies employed e.g. in smartcards, to the "everydays'" microcontrollers.

This is why I am HAPPY to see such discussions, and will continue to contribute to them links to general sources of knowledge on the topic, such as I did today, and maybe even more.

To try to pretend that there are no thieves makes absolutely no sense, nor does hiding the fact that most locks can be picked by simple tools (btw. do you know the classics "MIT Guide to Lockpicking"?)

JW