"From a small software company's perspective, it's virtually impossible to recover your investment without some sort of protection," Meeker said. "That's a standard provision ... you put in a contract with another company so that they can't reverse engineer the trade secret out of the product. That software took years to develop."
The case goes back to 1991, when Bowers accused Baystate of infringing on his 1990 patent for a CAD tool template, which supplemented other CAD software by organizing CAD commands in a logical manner. Baystate sued Bowers, hoping to get a court to declare that it did not infringe on Bowers' patent, and Bowers countersued.
Baystate had released an improved version of its own CAD software, after looking at Bowers' software, in early 1991, according to Court of Appeals documents. Bowers had offered to work with Baystate in the late '80s, but the company had rejected his offers, saying it had the in-house capabilities to develop its own CAD software. Baystate also pressured CAD software company Cadkey not to distribute Bowers' product, and later, Baystate purchased Cadkey and shut Bowers out of the market, according to court documents.
In September 2000, a U.S. District Court in Massachusetts awarded Bowers $5.27 million for breach of contract and patent infringement, and the Court of Appeals upheld that ruling in August 2002. "If you look at Mr. Bowers' perspective, he was basically forced out of business," said Meeker, defending the court's decision.
Meeker noted that Baystate had reproduced a handful of errors in Bowers program. Kann, Baystate's lawyer, said all the errors came from Bowers' user interface, not the underlying code.
No matter what the level of reverse engineering was in this case, broad prohibitions in an EULA could lead to more abuses in shrink-wrapped licenses, Copenhaver said. Contracts between two software developers that prohibit reverse engineering may be appropriate, she added, but broad prohibitions in EULAs would disadvantage software companies trying to check out competitors' products.
The Bowers case is an example of a good plaintiff -- in this case, an independent software developer going up against a bigger company -- not contributing to good law, she added. "This guy's got to be the most sympathetic plaintiff in the world," Copenhaver said. "This is the kind of guy you really want to protect."
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