In the "far east" it is apparently common practice, rather than being "frowned upon" or patently illegal as it is in the U.S. and most of Europe. It's not unheard-of, though, and, if your house is entered and property stolen, the offense is still "breaking and entering" even if nothing is stolen or disturbed, as what's broken is not the door, but the security that it represents.

There was, in recent years, a near certainty that if you sent a device to be manufactured in Taiwan, Korea, India, or the PRC, you'd have half-a-dozen competitors selling precise counterfeits of your product, often making it to the marketplace before your product. I don't know what that says about those nations' cultural biases regarding privacy, and property, but the fact that the majority of counterfeit CD's and DVD's are manufactured there should say something.





I don't think we disagree in general, but ...

If you can't reverse-engineer a product without copying the internal firmware in an MCU, then you simply aren't smart enough to do the job. Now, that doesn't mean you're dumb, quite to the contrary, but it means that the designers were smart enough to make it sufficiently difficult, which is their job.

If you leave your car sitting by the cafe, where you're having a coffee, unlocked, with the keys in the ignition, running or not, and someone gets in and drives it around the area, using some of your fuel, perhaps, but not otherwise harming it, and puts it back where you left it, he's stolen your fuel, but, he's probably not harmed you very much. On the other hand, he's definitely committed auto theft, even though he returned the car. If you were so foolish as to contribute to this event, whether the car was returned or not, you've gotten less than you deserve.

Likewise, if someone steals YOUR firmware, even though he's not denied you the use of it, in any sense, he's definitely committed an offense for which he should be punished. If you left it, in the form of a CD containing all the details, on the table at the cafe where you were having a coffee, and your competitor chances upon it, then, again, you get what you deserve, if that much. Nothing he could do would be less than you deserve, even if he copies it in its entirety and then sends it to your boss, with falsified details of how he got it by bribing you.

If your managers allow the company's IP to be removed in any form from the company facility, e.g. to the cafe, it's on THEM. If your managers allow unauthorized people, including cleaning staff or whatever, to enter the facility where they might have access, it's on THEM. If managers tell you to hurry and not worry about security, it's on THEM. If they allow you to take the work home, and something undesirable happens to result in its compromise, e.g. your notebook is stolen or lost, it's on THEM. It is, after all, THEIR responsibility to protect the company's interests. It's just up to the coder to implement and to execute the company's security policies as management dictates.

OTOH, if you can reverse-engineer a product, as part of your hobby, or as part of your job, you should be able to do it without breaking and entering, i.e. without getting inside the private domain of the internal code. If you succeed, then you're within the legal. If, OTOH, you steal the code, even if it's just to disassemble and examine it, you're a thief.

RE