Reverse engineering commercial encoding software

[nightslayer]

I've been interested in reverse engineering a *Commercial Encoder, purely for educational purposes and to show proof of concept.

I theirfore created a website offering an online decode service, so visitors can test and see for them self thats its possible to decode/reverse engineer this commercial encoding, to also proove thats its not worth paying for, since its insecure.

Even though i mentioned this on the website, I recieved an email from the authors of *Commercial Encoder, with the subject "facilitating intellectual
property theft"; they told me too "cease and desist from any further
public dissemination of information related to the reverse engineering of *Commercial Encoder".

My website is hosted in: Lithuania

So I was wondering can they do anything?, are their any law's in Lithuania which forbid this?

Advice please?

*Commercial Encoder = Censored name.

 

[Michael Wechsler]

Honestly, I don't know the law in Lithuania. If you're not providing the unencoded code, you should have less of any problem since you haven't disseminated the code to cause further damages. Now here's some interesting information from a well known web site and organization that tracks issues dealing with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act:

Chilling Effects - Information on the DMCA

Here are some excerpts and you can read the full text above:

Question: Is reverse engineering legal?
Answer: Reverse engineering has long been held a legitimate form of discovery in both legislation and court opinions. The Supreme Court has confronted the issue of reverse engineering in mechanical technologies several times, upholding it under the principles that it is an important method of the dissemination of ideas and that it encourages innovation in the marketplace.

Congress has also passed legislation in a number of different technological areas specifically permitting reverse engineering. The Semiconductor Chip Protection Act (SCPA) explicitly includes a reverse engineering privilege...

The law regarding reverse engineering in the computer software and hardware context is less clear, but has been described by many courts as an important part of software development...