Clean room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights and trade secrets associated with the original design. Clean room design is useful as a defense against copyright and trade secret infringement because it relies on independent invention. However, because independent invention is not a defense against patents, clean room designs typically cannot be used to circumvent patent restrictions.
Reverse engineering
Chinese wall refers to a reverse engineering method involving two separate groups. One group reverse-engineers the original code and writes thorough documentation, while the other group writes new code based only on the new documentation. This method insulates the new code from the old code, so that it will not be considered a derived work.
“中国墙”是指一种逆向工程方法,分别使用两个小组. 其中一组逆向工程师, 分析原始码,然后写出文档.
而另一组人则不看原来的代码,只根据前一组人新写的文档来编写新的源代码.