Clean room reverse engineering is for the case where you want to translate source code to source code and prove that you didn't just copy and paste it. (It's p

Clean room reverse engineering is for the case where you want to translate source code to source code and prove that you didn't just copy and paste it. (It's pretty easy for two people to generate the exact same bytes of source code for any given algorithm. The documentation around clean room reverse engineering is to prove that you independently came up with the same thing. The code is copyrightable, the idea isn't.) If you open up some chip and look at it under the microscope and translate the transistors you see into C code, that's not copyright infringement. (But it might be patented. Patents are super weird in that if you come up with an idea completely independently of someone else, and the other person patents it, you're not allowed to use the idea!)