the.com/clean room design
proving you copied the exam, not the answer key.
means a legal technique where engineers rebuild a rival product from its specs alone, using a team that never saw the original source code.
from born in the semiconductor and BIOS wars of the 1980s, when companies needed to reverse-engineer IBM PCs without triggering copyright infringement, so lawyers invented a firewall between the people who studied the original and the people who wrote the clone.
two teams ruleone reads the original, one never does
paper trailevery spec document is logged for court
not patentsdefends against copyright, not patent claims
for instance
phoenix technologies — built clean-room bios cloning into a whole industry
compaq bios — 1982 reverse-engineered ibm's bios and birthed the pc clone market
wine project — reimplements windows apis on linux without microsoft code