[dcow]

I understand the dmca protects reversing for the purposes of interoperability. My argument is not that the dmca is a foundation for clean room arguments. I just mentioned it because it protects the disassembly of binary code. It’s about clean rooms.

If it’s okay to implement software that does the same thing as some other proprietary software as long as you do it in a clean room, then it’s okay to implement software that does the same thing as other game software as long as you do it in a clean room.

So the argument is really about how clean the room is. Can the person verifying the output of the clean room, who is outside the clean room, also look at the binary? Can they look at the disassembly? These are legal questions. It would be interesting to understand more about these team’s setup, for sure.