Two teams in the same firm, as gruez says below. The key is that the second team does not look at the internals of the product, and that the two teams communicate only by specifications of interfaces (physical, software, electronic, etc.) and not of behavior.
This approach to cloning was established long ago (1960's) by IBM's competitors and has always been legal.
You can just google "clean room design", Wikipedia is quite informative on it.
BTW a few early PC firms did try to cut corners and clone the PC BIOS without the chinese wall; they were sued and died. This isn't theory; it's been practice for decades.
Hmm, IANAL, though I seem to believe there tends to be a question of "have you seen the original code before writing your clone" - which presumes that you still risk copying some code - or are you doing a "cleanroom reimplementation" without ever at all seeing the original code, just basing purely on a specification of the original, ideally written by someone else. As long as it's not pristine cleanroom, I think it's potentially murky territory.
userbinator's post clearly mentions cloning the hardware being problematic legality-wise and I was replying to that. Nobody's saying the cloned BIOS is problematic legal-wise.
>But simply cloning a user interface is legal, at least in US case law.
Can you give us citation that it is legal, or are making your claim based on the above lawsuits?
Having a look and feel that is "similar" but "not the same" is open to debate, but having 90% of the interface ripped off, pixel by pixel can't be just "ok". We don't know that because something so dumb didn't happen before in the highest level.
E.g. what is now a major Chinese player in the US market used to clone Juniper/Cisco routers down to the English silk screened assembly instructions on the circuit boards.
We can clone humans at current level of technology, otherwise there wouldn't be agreements about not doing it due to the ethical implications. Of course its just reproducing the initial hardware and not the memory contents or the changes in connections that happen at runtime.
no, you could very easily clone the Apple II easily and it was done many, many times
it's true that eventually Apple started suing people, but until Apple vs Franklin it was unclear if you could even copyright a BIOS. And once that was determined, people had to clean-room reverse engineer the BIOS but it was possible to make clones (see the Laser 128 and many many others)
this is just as open as the IBM PC was. You couldn't just drop a copy of the PC bios into your clone, you had to go to a 3rd-party reverse-engineered BIOS
This approach to cloning was established long ago (1960's) by IBM's competitors and has always been legal.
You can just google "clean room design", Wikipedia is quite informative on it.
BTW a few early PC firms did try to cut corners and clone the PC BIOS without the chinese wall; they were sued and died. This isn't theory; it's been practice for decades.
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