The development and legal purchase of "know-how" are costly. Accordingly, for companies in possession of "know-how" it is of vital interest to ensure that competitors do not gain access to their specialized knowledge. Taking this fact into consideration, this work concentrates on a problem area that has yet to be debated in depth, namely the distinction between protected and unprotected know-how in the case of "reverse engineering", which is the acquiring of construction and programming knowledge by dismantling and reverse development.