> Once it's established that person A has given _any_ details to person B, the upper bound on "expected cost of an effective defense" is dramatically higher. Y

> Once it's established that person A has given _any_ details to person B, the upper bound on "expected cost of an effective defense" is dramatically higher. Yeah but that's what clean room is. You said "A clean room implementation by people who haven’t seen the original work means there can be no discussion of copying, which makes it much cheaper and more reliable to fight an infringement claim." Something doesn't add up. If you were thinking about a situation where the developers don't get the original work, and nobody feeds them info based on the original work either, that's not clean room, that's something much harder.