Editing Clean-room design (section)

== Case law ==
Clean-room design is usually employed as best practice, but not strictly required by law. In ''[[NEC Corp. v Intel Corp.]]'' (1990), NEC sought [[declaratory judgment]] against Intel's charges that NEC's engineers simply copied the [[microcode]] of the [[8086]] processor in their [[NEC V20]] clone. A US judge ruled that while the early, internal revisions of NEC's microcode were indeed a copyright violation, the later one, which actually went into NEC's product, although derived from the former, were sufficiently different from the [[Intel microcode]] it could be considered free of copyright violations. While NEC themselves did not follow a strict clean-room approach in the development of their clone's microcode, during the trial, they hired an independent contractor who was only given access to specifications but ended up writing code that had certain similarities to both NEC's and Intel's code. From this evidence, the judge concluded that similarity in certain routines was a matter of functional constraints resulting from the compatibility requirements, and thus were likely free of a creative element.<ref>Jorge Contreras, Laura Handley, and Terrence Yang, "[http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v03/03HarvJLTech209.pdf ''NEC v. Intel'': Breaking New Ground in the Law of Copyright], ''Harvard Journal of Law & Technology'', Volume 3, Spring Issue, 1990, pp. 209–222 (particularly p. 213)</ref> Although the clean-room approach had been used as preventative measure in view of possible litigation before (e.g. in the Phoenix BIOS case), the ''NEC v. Intel'' case was the first time that the clean-room argument was accepted in a US court trial. A related aspect worth mentioning here is that NEC did have a license for Intel's patents governing the 8086 processor.<ref>David S. Elkins, “[http://repository.jmls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1423&context=jitpl ''NEC v. Intel'': A Guide to Using "Clean Room" Procedures as Evidence]”, Computer Law Journal, vol. 4, issue  10, (Winter 1990) pp. 453–481</ref>

''[[Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp.]]'' was a 1999 lawsuit which established an important [[precedent]] in regard to reverse engineering.<ref>{{Cite court
  |litigants = Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation
  |vol = 203
  |reporter = F.3d
  |opinion = 596
  |court = 9th Cir.
  |year = 2000
  |url=https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/203_F3d_596.htm }}</ref><ref>''[https://web.archive.org/web/20070228070634/http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/0/66b3a352ea33712988256952007578c2?OpenDocument Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation]'', 203 F.3d 596 (9th Cir. 2000).  Web Archive.org copy, Feb 28, 2007.</ref> [[Sony]] sought damages for [[copyright infringement]] over [[Connectix]]'s [[Virtual Game Station]] emulator, alleging that its proprietary BIOS code had been copied into Connectix's product without permission. Sony won the initial judgment, but the ruling was overturned on appeal. Sony eventually purchased the rights to Virtual Game Station to prevent its further sale and development. This established a precedent addressing the legal implications of commercial reverse engineering efforts.

During production, Connectix unsuccessfully attempted a [[Chinese wall#Computer science|Chinese wall]] approach to [[reverse engineering|reverse engineer]] the BIOS, so its engineers [[disassembler|disassembled]] the [[object code]] directly. Connectix's successful appeal maintained that the direct disassembly and observation of proprietary code was necessary because there was no other way to determine its behavior. From the ruling:

<blockquote>Some works are closer to the core of intended copyright protection than others. Sony's BIOS lay at a distance from the core because it contains unprotected aspects that cannot be examined without copying. The court of appeal therefore accorded it a lower degree of protection than more traditional literary works.</blockquote>