Whilst copyright laws exist to discourage or keep at bay would-be competitors (or even pirates) from stealing the designs and ideas for their own commercial gains, PCB reverse engineering services are still very much sought after, more as a desperate attempt to resolve the genuine problems of obsolescence or lack of support, and in such cases the PCBs reproduced are usually intended for internal consumption and not external circulation. Confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement (NDA) will also ensure that only the customer and the service provider are the only parties in the know.
It's a fine line we're treading when we do reverse-engineering of any sort. We need to ask ourselves why we're doing what we're doing, and whether we're doing it out of necessity on a personal capacity to get our job done, or out of curiosity when a certain PCB design so intrigued and interests our engineering senses that we couldn't pass it by without knowing what makes it tick. Frankly, troubleshooting and diagnosing PCBs without documentation invariably involves some degree of reverse-engineering, albeit in a less systematic and perhaps haphazard way. Prior to taking up reverse-engineering using Visio, I did what many repair technicians or engineers would do when stumped with a PCB without schematics—create partial sketches of the circuits I was analyzing, hand-drawn or with the help of primitive graphics editor.
Having said that, I personally do not endorse PCB reverse engineering to be used as a tool for anti-competition or theft of design, in which the end result is the financial lost of the rightful designer or company concerned. I believe that as an engineer, there is a code of honor to live by and uphold, by which personal enrichment and knowledge can be gained and shared, but not at the expense of others.
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