I think I've found it for everyone interested. There appears to be an exception for this in EU IP law. Articles 5(3) and 6 of the Software Directive appear to allow EU companies to reverse engineer competitors’ products in order to produce compatible products.

Here is the excerpt:

Article 5 - Exceptions to the restricted acts

…..

3.   The person having a right to use a copy of a computer program shall be entitled, without the authorisation of the rightholder, to observe, study or test the functioning of the program in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the program if he does so while performing any of the acts of loading, displaying, running, transmitting or storing the program which he is entitled to do.

Article 6 – Decompilation

1.   The authorisation of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form within the meaning of points (a) and (b) of Article 4(1) are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met:

(a)

those acts are performed by the licensee or by another person having a right to use a copy of a program, or on their behalf by a person authorised to do so;

(b)

the information necessary to achieve interoperability has not previously been readily available to the persons referred to in point (a); and

(c)

those acts are confined to the parts of the original program which are necessary in order to achieve interoperability.

2.   The provisions of paragraph 1 shall not permit the information obtained through its application:

(a)

to be used for goals other than to achieve the interoperability of the independently created computer program;

(b)

to be given to others, except when necessary for the interoperability of the independently created computer program; or

(c)

to be used for the development, production or marketing of a computer program substantially similar in its expression, or for any other act which infringes copyright.

3.   In accordance with the provisions of the Berne Convention for the protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the provisions of this Article may not be interpreted in such a way as to allow its application to be used in a manner which unreasonably prejudices the rightholder's legitimate interests or conflicts with a normal exploitation of the computer program.