In general to avoid IP legal problems in the USA you can't do all of that yourself. Generally one party has to do all of the reverse engineering and write a specification based on that. Then another party can take that specification and write a "clean room" implementation.

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...

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charcircuit 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Are there examples where a single person doing it gets successfully sued? It could just be that those companies were extra risk adverse so they came up with monetarily inefficient ways to defend themselves.

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AnthonyMouse 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's sort of the other side of that coin. There was a case where a company did it like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

The courts said that was fine, and whenever that happens, lawyers are going to tell people to do it exactly like that since it's a known-good way to do it, whereas some other way is maybe and who wants a maybe if you have the option to lockstep the process that was previously approved?

Of course, if you do it a different way and then that gets approved, things change. But only after somebody actually goes to court over it, which generally nobody enjoys, not least because the outcome is uncertain.

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charcircuit 3 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, but "can't" is a strong thing to say, when actually the result is thought to be legally untested.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You have to understand where "can't" comes from. It's a multi-layered system. If the government says you can do it one way and then the corporation's lawyers tell them to do it that way, corporate policy then becomes that you have to do it that way, and you therefore "can't" do it some other way. This is why government regulations often create perverse incentives and unintended consequences. You can't just consider what the rule says, you have to consider how people are going to respond to it. This is why e.g. the DMCA takedown process is widely abused. Do corporations have to execute obviously invalid takedown requests? Maybe not. Are most of them going to, when the consequence of doing it is harm to powerless third party individuals and the consequence of not doing it is potential liability for the corporation? Yup.

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ctoth 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been thinking about this recently. What if one of the parties is an LLM?

	▲	jsheard 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Who knows, someone will have to get dragged into court to set that precedent one way or the other.
	▲	drdaeman 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think we’re waiting for the courts to deem LLMs able to sidestep any copyright and contract laws. If they do, artists and writers may be pissed, but engineers are gonna be lit (as long as they hate current status quo of nothing being interoperable)

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realo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So... I ask Gemini to write a technical spec and Claude Code to implement it?

Basically a week-end project...