Comment by CheezeIt
5 years ago
Clean room design is a whole thing that people do, because of copyright. Maybe they don’t need to do that. If you want to quit the search team at Google and make your own search company, I’m not against that, but you should expect scrutiny like the kind Levandowski had.
Clean room design of software has absolutely nothing to do with copyright because software concepts cannot be copyrighted. I would encourage you to study these legal concepts further before you debate them, because you’re coming off quite uninformed. Copyright has a specific purpose and specific limits. Studying a competitive software product and cloning it (even non clean room) is, again, not a copyright violation unless you’re literally pulling code from the competitive product. Nearly all clean rooms are to avoid patents and specific implementation thereof in the software space. This is different when it comes to other fields, so I get the confusion.
Theft of intellectual property in the case you cited also barely touches copyright. Put another way, copyright status of the property in question is largely immaterial to securing a conviction on the allegation.
No, it is directly to avoid copyright. It doesn’t protect against patents. Trademarks are irrelevant. What other form of IP is there?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Wikipedia is speaking to a broader application of copyright than software. It’s also targeting an international audience, where this varies.
Again, you’re coming off uninformed here and relying on Wikipedia (which doesn’t speak to that context) isn’t really helping.
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Clean room design is about wholesale copying of code. If you copied the APIs and architecture and wrote the code differently there would be nothing wrong as SCOTUS just ruled.
You’re stretching SCOTUS’s ruling about API’s farther than it goes.