Reading a standards spec to understand what the device you paid for does?

Straight to jail!

Pirating the entire internet to train your AI?

That's fair use.

The game is getting sued by the HDMI forum. It doesn't matter how "clean" your implementation was. They're just going to sue you _anyways_.

Innocence until proven guilty should mean the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to prove you actually looked at it right? Although that isn't necessarily how it works in the real world. IANAL.

But I also don't understand how they would enforce that you can't use a leaked spec. If there are patents involved that would hinder an open source implementation regardless of if it was clean room or not. I don't think copyright would apply, because the implementation is not the same as the spec. And trademark would only apply if you used hdmi branding materials (so just say something like "this driver provides compatibility with an interface that has been hostile to open source that starts with h and ends with i"), and if you use a leaked spec, you didn't sign any contracts saying you can't implement it.

IIUC, the problem is a bit tautological. Regardless of legality of reverse engineering itself, HDMI is a trademark which you obviously cannot use without being licensed. Using HDMI connector itself is probably a grey-ish area: while you can buy the connectors without agreeing to any licenses and forwarding compliance on vendor, it would still be hard to argue that you had no idea it was a HDMI connector. If you are using the HDMI connector, but are not sending anything else but DVI over it, it should be fine-ish.

The real problem starts when you want to actually support HDMI 2.0 and 2.1 on top. Arguing that you have licenced for 2.0 and then tacked a clean-room implementation of 2.1 on top gets essentially impossible.

AFAIK clean-room reverse engineering is sufficient but not always necessary for such an implementation to be allowed, but it does make the fair use argument a bit more difficult. (and of course the DMCA criminalizes any reverse engineering of 'technical safeguards' regardless of how you do it)

Clean room RE isn't legally required. It just makes a stronger defense against claims of infringement.

They don't really have to worry about patent infringement, the biggest issue is that they can implement anything they want, they just can't call it HDMI 2.1 without certification.

That's confusing for the consumer but technically viable.

HDMI exists to write standards, to certify them and to enforce the brand integrity. Patents are a different issue and would be handled separately.

(I am an engineer who spent half his career dealing with this stuff at a technical, legal and commercial level).

Clean room reverse engineering produces specification when you don't have it. When you have specification, you don't have to reverse engineer it.

> You'd somehow have to prove you didn't look at it

You can't prove something that didn't happen, unless you were monitored your whole life or at least from the moment the item came into being. It's an unreasonable level of proof.

>You'd somehow have to prove you didn't look at it, ever, or at least be trusted enough for people to take your word for it.

How could one prove a negative? It's supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, isn't it? They'd have to prove that you've looked at the spec files.

Probably now or the very near future you could have an LLM that's provably trained on dataset where the leaked spec isn't included in the dataset and have it perform the reverse engineering work.