IANAL, but my understanding is that this is not clear-cut. Clean room implementations aren't strictly required by law, but the legal standard is how similar the

IANAL, but my understanding is that this is not clear-cut. Clean room implementations aren't strictly required by law, but the legal standard is how similar the new work is to the copyrighted work. If an employee reads open source code and then writes substantially similar code, as copilot sometimes does, that could be found to be infringement by a court. For this reason, I've worked at places that forbid employees even reading open-source code. If we were having difficulty with an open-soruce component to the point where we needed to look at the code, we'd hire a contractor, explain the problem, and then they'd explain a solution, and all the communications would go through a company lawyer.