Since their inception in 1994, design patterns have been the subject of many papers. In the reverse-engineering community, several authors have proposed approaches to consider design patterns during reverseand re-engineering. However, it has been recently put forward in the community that it is difficult to compare previous approaches due to the diversity of vocabulary and the lack of a general...

INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................210 I. THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CONTEXT OF REVERSE ENGINEERING..............................................................................212 A. Intellectual Property Law and Reverse Engineering ............212 B. No Coherent Treatment of Reverse Engineering.................215 II. REVERSE ENGINEE...