@elfineThe fact you are looking into a file to search some information or just to know to what this correspond is usually called Data mining,
Data mining may include reverse engineering the format of a data file, but reverse engineering is a distinct activity that may be performed for other purposes as well.
@WyldanimalI agree with you, but arguing by analogy doesn't always work.
Can you open and Read a BOOK?
is that reverse engineering or hacking the Book?
If you analyze an author's style for the purpose of writing a new story featuring characters created by that author, that is probably the equivalent to hacking and may be a ***** of copyright law.
@TheEmuData mining is a different activity altogether and is applied to the process of getting nuggets of information from huge data repositories.
Well, to quibble if you are data mining a collection of HTML files you probably need to do some reverse engineering of the format before you actually dig for data.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm well aware that lawyer write things to protect their clients interests as broadly as possible. In the License Totem says "the Software or the Product". Both terms are more than a little ambiguous and the use of both implies that they are not the same. Perhaps "the Product" includes all the data files. Perhaps not. In the US reverse engineering a file format seems to be an acceptable practice. Certainly may large companies do it publicly all the time. I agree that working out file formats is a form of reverse engineering, but this may not be something that could be enforced in the US under the terms of the License agreement.
A fine line would be, if you Decompiled the Executable Binary file to determine how the data was read from the Models.lst file.
I agree and I don't know on which side of that line a judge would rule.
if I remember correctly companies like Microsoft and Oracle have argued very strongly that the internal formats of various files and message protocols used by their products are covered by the prohibitions on reverse engineering. When they have lost such arguments it was because of a special provison in the law that allows, in some circumstances, reverse engineering for the purposes of interfacing with other products.
Since there is very little law on the subject explicitly, a lot of the rulings have to do with industry expectations and whether a license has overreaching terms.
I have some friends who have acted as expert witnesses is reverse engineering cases. These were all about reverse engineering of source code. The winning argument often included either the presence of dead code in the defendant's product or a sub-optimal or erroneous sequence of commands