Is there any legal significance to "clean-room" reverse-engineering? I hear this term a lot from engineers who seem to think that they're entitled to claim ownership over distinct works created by people who read their source code (and in extreme cases their documentation or even disassembled binaries), but that's not how any other form of intellectual property works.
Yes, there is significant legal precedent for the practice. Sony v. Connectix, Inc. comes to mind. Team A directly reversed Sony's PS1 BIOS and gave the resulting specifications to team B, which then implemented those in source code form.
This is the difference between patents and copyright.
A mechanism that is patented can not be implemented by anyone. It doesn't matter if they did or did not read your source, they cannot implement it. It doesn't even matter if they knew the patent existed or that even that it had been done before.
Copyright is a lot more forgiving. It only covers the exact implementation. Doing a clean room implemation means you will write different code that does the exact or very similar thing.
