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Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design. Clean-room design is useful as a defense against copyright infringement because it relies on independent creation. However, because independent invention is not a defense against patents, clean-room designs typically cannot be used to circumvent patent restrictions. The term implies that the design team works in an environment that is "clean" or demonstrably uncontaminated by any knowledge of the proprietary techniques used by the competitor. Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone examine the system to be reimplemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners.


Examples

Phoenix Technologies Phoenix Technologies Ltd is an American company that designs, develops and supports core system software for personal computers and other computing devices. The company's products commonly referred to as BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) or firm ...
sold its clean-room implementation of the IBM-compatible BIOS to various PC clone manufacturers. Several other PC clone companies, including Corona Data Systems, Eagle Computer, and Handwell Corporation, were litigated by IBM for copyright infringement, and were forced to re-implement their BIOS in a way which did not infringe IBM's copyrights. The legal precedent for firmware being protected by copyright, however, hadn't been established until ''
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. ''Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp.'', 714 F.2d 1240 (3d Cir. 1983), was the first time an appellate level court in the United States held that a computer's BIOS could be protected by copyright. As second impact, this ruling clarifie ...
'', 714 F.2d 1240 (3rd Circuit Court 1983). The three settlements by IBM, and the legal clean-room PC BIOS designs of
Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
and
Columbia Data Products Columbia Data Products, Inc. (CDP) is a company which produced the first legally reverse-engineered IBM PC clones. It faltered in that market after only a few years, and later reinvented itself as a software development company. History 1976� ...
, happened before Phoenix announced, in July 1984, that they were licensing their own BIOS code. Phoenix expressly emphasized the clean-room process through which their BIOS code had been written by a programmer who did not even have prior exposure to Intel microprocessors, himself having been a TMS9900 programmer beforehand. As late as the early 1990s, IBM was winning millions of dollars from settling BIOS copyright infringement lawsuits against some other PC clone manufacturers like Matsushita/ Panasonic (1987) and
Kyocera is a Japanese multinational ceramics and electronics manufacturer headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It was founded as in 1959 by Kazuo Inamori and renamed in 1982. It manufactures industrial ceramics, solar power generating systems, telecommun ...
(1993–1994), although the latter suit was for infringements between 1985 and 1990. Another clean-room design example is VTech's successful clones of the
Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-mol ...
ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * R ...
s for the
Laser 128 The Laser 128 is an Apple II clone, released by VTech in 1986 and comparable to the Apple IIe and Apple IIc. Description VTech Laser 128 has 128 kB of RAM. Like the Apple IIc, it is a one-piece semi-portable design with a carrying handle an ...
, the only computer model, among dozens of Apple II compatibles, which survived
litigation - A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil act ...
brought by
Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...
. The "Laser 128 story" is in contrast to the Franklin Ace 1000, which lost in the 1983 decision, '' Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corporation''. The previous PC "clone" examples are notable for not daring to fight IBM in court, even before the legal precedent for copyrighting firmware had been made. Other examples include ReactOS, an open source operating system made from clean-room reverse-engineered components of Windows, and Coherent operating system, a clean room re-implementation of version 7 Unix. In the early years of its existence, Coherent's developer Mark Williams Company received a visit from an AT&T delegation looking to determine whether MWC was infringing on AT&T Unix property. It has been released as open source.


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 In processor design, microcode (μcode) is a technique that interposes a layer of computer organization between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. Microcode is a lay ...
of the
8086 The 8086 (also called iAPX 86) is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus (allowi ...
processor in their
NEC V20 The NEC V20 is a microprocessor that was designed and produced by NEC. It is both pin compatible and object code compatible with the Intel 8088, with an instruction set architecture (ISA) similar to that of the Intel 80188 with some extension ...
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 Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series ...
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. 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. '' Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation'' was a 1999 lawsuit which established an important precedent in regard to reverse engineering.
Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
sought damages for copyright infringement over Connectix's
Virtual Game Station The Virtual Game Station (VGS, code named Bonestorm) was an emulator by Connectix that allows Sony PlayStation games to be played on a desktop computer. It was first released for the Macintosh, in 1999, after being previewed at Macworld/iWorld ...
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 approach to reverse engineer the BIOS, so its engineers 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:
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.


In popular culture

* In the first season of the 2014 TV show '' Halt and Catch Fire'', a key plot point from the second episode is how the fictional Cardiff Electric computer company placed an engineer in a clean room to reverse engineer a BIOS for its PC clone, to provide cover and protection from IBM lawsuits for a previous probably-illegal hacking of the BIOS code others at the company had performed. It reminded many critics of Compaq's million dollar clean-room engineering, but a contemporary, but far less successful company,
Columbia Data Products Columbia Data Products, Inc. (CDP) is a company which produced the first legally reverse-engineered IBM PC clones. It faltered in that market after only a few years, and later reinvented itself as a software development company. History 1976� ...
, also used such an approach. The reaction of IBM's legal department, like other plot points, echoed the experiences of Corona Data Systems more closely.


See also

* Code morphing


References


Further reading

* * * * {{Design Computer law