It is illegal to reverse engineer proprietary file formats?
<p>The file formats MPQ and CASC are two container formats developed by Blizzard in 1996 and 2014 respectively. Both formats are proprietary and there's no official specification. If these formats are reverse engineered for release of a software library for reading/writing such files, will it infringe on Blizzard rights?</p>

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<p>In Germany (and similarly in the entire EU since Germany implements EU directives in this case), Reverse Engineering is legal <em>IFF</em></p>
<ol>
<li>the thing you are Reverse Engineering is publicly available <em>OR</em></li>
<li>you are legally in possession of the thing (note, you do not!!! need to own it, only possess it) you are reverse engineering.</li>
</ol>
<p>It is however possible to contractually restrict this, e.g. if you give a test exemplar to your customers, they are legally in the possession of the exemplar, but you can contractually prevent them from reverse engineering it, as a condition of you providing them the exemplar.</p>
<p>Note that this right to reverse engineer only applies to trade secrets – patent protections or other IP protections are unaffected.</p>
<p>This was introduced in 2019 as part of the <em>Gesetz zum Schutz von Geschäftsgeheimnissen</em>, specifically §3,I,2. The <em>GeschGehG</em> implements EU directive 2016/943.</p>

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