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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 associated with the original design. Clean room design is useful as a defense against copyright 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. The term implies that the design team works in an environment that is "clean" or demonstrably uncontaminated by any knowledge of the proprietary techniques used by the competitor. Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone examine the system to be reimplemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners. == Examples == A famous example is that of Columbia Data Products, who built the first clone of an IBM computer through a clean-room implementation of its BIOS. The more commonly cited case is Phoenix Technologies, which sold its clean-room implementation to various PC clone manufacturers. Other PC clone companies such as Corona Data Systems, Eagle Computer, and Handwell Corporation were successfully sued by IBM for copyright infringement in 1984 and forced to re-implement their BIOS in a way that did not infringe IBM's copyrights.〔(EAGLE'S BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL )〕 These three settlements happened before Phoenix made their announcement in July that year that they were licensing their own BIOS code, expressly emphasizing the clean-room process through which Phoenix's BIOS code had been written by a programmer who did not even have prior exposure to Intel microprocessors, himself having been a TMS9900 programmer beforehand. As late as the early 1990s, IBM was winning millions of dollars from settling BIOS copyright infringement lawsuits against some other PC clone manufacturers like Matsushita/Panasonic (1987) and Kyocera (1993-1994), although the latter suit was for infringements between 1985 and 1990.〔(Japanese Company Is Sued By I.B.M. Over Copyrights )〕 Another clean-room design example is VTech's successful clones of the Apple II ROMs for the Laser 128, the only computer model among dozens of Apple II compatibles which survived litigation brought by Apple Computer. ReactOS is an open source operating system made from clean-room reverse-engineered components of Windows. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「clean room design」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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