Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
It really, really wouldn't.
A clean room reimplementation is not copyright violation.
AMD produced completely Intel-compatible CPUs using the same process. One team would example the Intel CPU and produce a complete specification of how it worked. A second team would take that specification and produce a compatible CPU of their own. As long as team two never actually see the original CPU, this is clean.
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Electronic chips are functional devices, and as such, the copyright is inherent in the implementations, and the courts have ruled that a specification for a device cannot be a creative work worthy of copyright --- there is no such ruling for the description of a book's cover image, esp. one so detailed as to essentially allow re-creation, and a number of court cases going the other way, and a myriad number of times when the settlement was reached out of court in the original designer's favour.