They can't do anything about Star Office reverse-engineering the Word .doc format... This would be the same thing.

Eh... Not so fast, my friend. DOC, XLS, PPT are just file formats. What we're talking about with Streets & Trips is *data* in a file format. That data itself likely has some kind of copyright attached to it, and, I'd bet, was purchased by Microsoft from some other company. That company would likely be the people who would sue you, not Microsoft.

It seems that reverse-engineering file formats doesn't raise many eyebrows at Microsoft, and the law gets really grey when stuff like that happens... But taking proprietary *data* and reverse-engineering that, I think that's a little different. We'd need a team of lawyers to sift through the Streets & Trips EULA, but I'd imagine there's a clause in there prohibiting using the data for anything other than their software... Whether it would hold up in court is questionable since EULA's always have at least one ridiculous non-enforcable and downright illegal clause in them, but I would bet the map data is protected more strongly than the DOC format, which is just a format.