How to check copyright?

Posted Oct 3, 2025 9:40 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: How to check copyright? by ballombe
Parent article: Fedora floats AI-assisted contributions policy

Clean-room reverse-engineering isn't part of the codified side of copyright law; rather, it's a process that the courts recognise as guaranteeing that the work produced in the clean room cannot be a derived work of the original.

To be a derived work, there must be some copying of the original, intended or accidental. The clean-room process guarantees that the people in the clean-room cannot copy the original, and therefore, if they do come up with something that appears to be a copy of the original, it's not a derived work.

You can, of course, do reverse-engineering and reimplementation without a clean-room setup; it's just that you then have to show that each piece that's alleged to be a literal copy of the original falls on the right side of the idea-expression distinction to not be a derived work, instead of being able to show that no copying took place.