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I don't think that'd be as easy as you'd think. They would need brand new contributors to make those changes. There'd be no way to prove that existing contribut

I don't think that'd be as easy as you'd think. They would need brand new contributors to make those changes. There'd be no way to prove that existing contributors hadn't been tainted by reading the source under the previous license - especially problematic if they've contributed changes to any affected source files.

geofft 10y ago
Is there a legal source (i.e., not a hacker-folklore source) for the claim that a "clean room" reimplementation needs to be from someone who is not mentally contaminated by awareness of the old implementation? In particular, in Oracle v. Google it turned out that Google employed the same person (Joshua Bloch) to write a bunch of Dalvik core libraries who had previously written the same Java core libraries, and that somehow was not an issue in the case. Only the nine identical lines of rangeCheck were an issue. So I'm questioning my understanding of the law here.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Is there a legal source (i.e., not a hacker-folklore source) for the claim that a "clean room" reimplementation needs to be from someone who is not mentally contaminated by awareness of the old implementation? Exposure increases the risk that work that appears like it might be derivative will be found to derivative, but there is no legal rule about it, it's just evidence from which a trier of fact might, in combination with other evidence, conclude derivation in violation of copyright. Clean room means that (presuming the trier of fact accepts that it was a clean room) there can be no derivation or copying, because there was no access to the source from which that could have occurred. This isn't about the legal rule directly, but about evidence from which one might conclude that a violation of the rule occurred. Of course, given API copyrights, rewriting code to implement the API of existing code is potentially problematic even with a clean room implementation, since the API is preserved.
- int_19h 10y ago
  The "no mental contamination" thing, including nature of interaction, "cooldown" periods etc, is how this was described to me by lawyers in two of the companies I worked at. So they at least took it seriously, but I don't know about the source they were basing their guidelines on.
- hermitdev 10y ago
  IANAL, so I can't give you an educated response here. Not being a lawyer, I tend to act with an abundance of caution in these areas. I worked on certain financial data models for long enough (9 years, a quarter of my life) that they're burned into my brain. Even though it's been 4 years since I've worked for that company, I could easily reproduce probably at least 90% of the data model with a fairly high degree of accuracy. That is stuff I cannot unlearn or forget. I never signed a non-compete, but I did sign an NDA that expired after a year, so I'd be in the clear if I were to re-implement something similar (I wouldn't - the data model was awful).
  - geofft 10y ago
    Right, but that's an idea or a design or an architecture (the realm of, if anything, patents), not a creative presentation (the realm of copyright). And the fact that I can go work for a competitor for my current employer and not have to worry about copyrights, just about NDAs and non-competes, makes me think that the copyright worry about clean-room reimplementation is bogus.

geofft 10y ago

Is there a legal source (i.e., not a hacker-folklore source) for the claim that a "clean room" reimplementation needs to be from someone who is not mentally contaminated by awareness of the old implementation? In particular, in Oracle v. Google it turned out that Google employed the same person (Joshua Bloch) to write a bunch of Dalvik core libraries who had previously written the same Java core libraries, and that somehow was not an issue in the case. Only the nine identical lines of rangeCheck were an issue. So I'm questioning my understanding of the law here.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Is there a legal source (i.e., not a hacker-folklore source) for the claim that a "clean room" reimplementation needs to be from someone who is not mentally contaminated by awareness of the old implementation? Exposure increases the risk that work that appears like it might be derivative will be found to derivative, but there is no legal rule about it, it's just evidence from which a trier of fact might, in combination with other evidence, conclude derivation in violation of copyright. Clean room means that (presuming the trier of fact accepts that it was a clean room) there can be no derivation or copying, because there was no access to the source from which that could have occurred. This isn't about the legal rule directly, but about evidence from which one might conclude that a violation of the rule occurred. Of course, given API copyrights, rewriting code to implement the API of existing code is potentially problematic even with a clean room implementation, since the API is preserved.
int_19h 10y ago
The "no mental contamination" thing, including nature of interaction, "cooldown" periods etc, is how this was described to me by lawyers in two of the companies I worked at. So they at least took it seriously, but I don't know about the source they were basing their guidelines on.
hermitdev 10y ago
IANAL, so I can't give you an educated response here. Not being a lawyer, I tend to act with an abundance of caution in these areas. I worked on certain financial data models for long enough (9 years, a quarter of my life) that they're burned into my brain. Even though it's been 4 years since I've worked for that company, I could easily reproduce probably at least 90% of the data model with a fairly high degree of accuracy. That is stuff I cannot unlearn or forget. I never signed a non-compete, but I did sign an NDA that expired after a year, so I'd be in the clear if I were to re-implement something similar (I wouldn't - the data model was awful).
- geofft 10y ago
  Right, but that's an idea or a design or an architecture (the realm of, if anything, patents), not a creative presentation (the realm of copyright). And the fact that I can go work for a competitor for my current employer and not have to worry about copyrights, just about NDAs and non-competes, makes me think that the copyright worry about clean-room reimplementation is bogus.