Clean room is a legal defense that argues “I implemented similar functionality without consulting the copyrighted work” and sometimes with the addition of “or ever having viewed the original copyrighted work”.
For video games the binary is the covered work, not its disassembly. And disassembly is covered by the DMCA and explicitly allowed for this type of purpose, so that’s not illegal at least. I can see the argument if the clean agent is just operating off the disassembly and a different person is evaluating success.
After all, how does one communicate the goal of a “traditional” source code clean room operation? Well someone has to disassemble the target functionality into a natural language description of the algorithm and communicate the requirements and expected outcomes, the functions if you will, to the agents as well as check success. Why does using a computer to aid that process make things questionable?
IMO the whole notion of a clean room for copyright purposes is weird across the board. Not just when punks do it.
For video games the binary is the covered work, not its disassembly. And disassembly is covered by the DMCA and explicitly allowed for this type of purpose, so that’s not illegal at least. I can see the argument if the clean agent is just operating off the disassembly and a different person is evaluating success.
After all, how does one communicate the goal of a “traditional” source code clean room operation? Well someone has to disassemble the target functionality into a natural language description of the algorithm and communicate the requirements and expected outcomes, the functions if you will, to the agents as well as check success. Why does using a computer to aid that process make things questionable?
IMO the whole notion of a clean room for copyright purposes is weird across the board. Not just when punks do it.