Comment by bigyabai
9 hours ago
Probably not. Clean room RE is serious business, projects like Dolphin have to carefully vet contributors to remain legal.
9 hours ago
Probably not. Clean room RE is serious business, projects like Dolphin have to carefully vet contributors to remain legal.
Everyone says this, and then exactly zero cases are cited in support of or against this creative legal theory known as "clean room RE."
No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.
When you say "case" does that mean you're rejecting the evidence of Phoenix technologies not getting sued along with all the other BIOS clones?
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "Not getting sued" doesn't validate a legal theory - legal theories are validated in court where they become case law. Until then, they are plainly speculative.
This "clean room RE" fabrication is also not something so obviously compelling that nobody would ever attempt to challenge it - it's just that nobody has cared to put dollars behind it. IP provenance cases are enormously difficult to prove and are almost always settled ahead of trial. This concept is software engineer folklore more than anything.
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But there are plenty of successful projects which would probably have been taken down if it wasn't for clean room RE. I mean just look at the clean room IBM BIOS clones from "IBM compatibles" in the early days of the personal computer.
This is the same logic that the TSA uses to justify its existence. "We're so good nobody attempts it!"
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there isn't ?? I sorta thought we figured all this out decades ago when SMB and DeCSS were being reversed? I think dosemu or something as well ?
I seem to recall DeCSS being the 'hot button' as it was RE'd in a 'non clean' way, the code released, and then a 'clean room' RE could be made from the 'public' info ??
edit: actually, at the time I think there was German law allowing RE for 'interoperablity' or some such. But that was a long time ago so my memory might be off.
Who volunteers to be the shmuck that fights Nintendo's lawyers in court? Who's funding the defense against Apple?
It's safest to err on the side of plausible deniability, any proximity to OEM software increases liability if things go wrong.
Nintendo doesn't care. There's been proprietary Nintendo SDK code in libogc (open source library for making GameCube homebrew) for years. And more recently the various decompilation process have made recreations of linked code from the SDK that compile match byte for byte. In practice the legal risk of being sued into oblivion for this is not there. If anything there would be a DMCA takedown / cease and desist.
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