Clean room design
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 sold its clean-room implementation of the IBM-compatible BIOS to various PC clone manufacturers.[1][2]
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.[3][4] The legal precedent for firmware being protected by copyright, however, hadn't been established until Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240 (3rd Circuit Court 1983). The three settlements by IBM, and the legal clean-room PC BIOS designs of
Another clean-room design example is
Other examples include ReactOS, an open source operating system made from clean-room reverse-engineered components of Windows,[13] and Coherent operating system, a clean room re-implementation of version 7 Unix.[14] 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.[15] It has been released as open source.[14]
Case law
Clean room design is usually employed as best practice, but not strictly required by law. In
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, also used such an approach.[20] The reaction of IBM's legal department, like other plot points, echoed the experiences of Corona Data Systems more closely.[21]
See also
References
- ^ Schwartz, Mathew (2001-11-12). "Reverse-Engineering". computerworld.com. Retrieved 2013-06-23.
To protect against charges of having simply (and illegally) copied IBM's BIOS, Phoenix reverse-engineered it using what's called a "clean room," or "Chinese wall," approach. First, a team of engineers studied the IBM BIOS—about 8KB of code—and described everything it did as completely as possible without using or referencing any actual code. Then Phoenix brought in a second team of programmers who had no prior knowledge of the IBM BIOS and had never seen its code. Working only from the first team's functional specifications, the second team wrote a new BIOS that operated as specified.
- ISBN 978-0-89930-974-3.
- ^ Caruso, Denise (February 27, 1984), "IBM Wins Disputes Over PC Copyrights", InfoWorld, p. 15, retrieved February 28, 2011
- ^ Sanger, David E. (9 June 1984). "EAGLE'S BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL". The New York Times.
- ISSN 0888-8507.
- ISSN 0010-4841.
- ^ Pollack, Andrew (2 February 1993). "COMPANY NEWS; Japanese Company Is Sued By I.B.M. Over Copyrights". The New York Times.
- ISBN 978-90-411-0974-3.
- ^ "A brief recap of the lawsuit". coolcopyright.com. Archived from the original on 2008-07-03. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
- ^ "IMPACT OF APPLE VS. FRANKLIN DECISION By Rob Hassett". internetlegal.com. 18 December 2012. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
- ^ "Refusal of Apple's injunction request". The New York Times. 4 August 1982. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
- ^ "The Making of a Computer by Perry Greenberg" (PDF). classiccmp.org. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
- ^ "A dumb hypothetical about the legality of someone documenting Windows XP - ReactOS Forum".
- ^ a b "Coherent sources released under a 3-clause BSD license – Virtually Fun". virtuallyfun.com. 8 January 2015. Retrieved 20 September 2018.
- Usenet: [email protected].
- ^ Jorge Contreras, Laura Handley, and Terrence Yang, "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)
- ^ David S. Elkins, “NEC v. Intel: A Guide to Using "Clean Room" Procedures as Evidence”, Computer Law Journal, vol. 4, issue 10, (Winter 1990) pp. 453–481
- Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation, 203 F.3d 596(9th Cir. 2000).
- ^ Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation, 203 F.3d 596 (9th Cir. 2000). Web Archive.org copy, Feb 28, 2007.
- ^ Aboard the Columbia, By Bill Machrone, Page 451, Jun 1983, PC Mag
- ISSN 0199-6649.
Further reading
- Rachel Parker (28 September 1987). "'Secured Facility' Solves Compatibility Conflicts". InfoWorld: The Newspaper for the Microcomputing Community. InfoWorld: 41. ISSN 0199-6649.
- Peter Groves (2011). A Dictionary of Intellectual Property Law. Edward Elgar Publishing. p. 53. ISBN 978-1-84980-778-4.
- Lee Burgunder (2010). Legal Aspects of Managing Technology (5th ed.). Cengage Learning. pp. 281–285. ISBN 978-1-4390-7981-2.
- Jonathan Band; Masanobu Katoh (2011). Interfaces on Trial 2.0. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-29446-1.