Clean room reverse engineering

[Johannes Buchner]

On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:10:09 +0100
Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> wrote:

> Vlad Stanimir <vladbv2006 at gmail.com> writes:
> > I was considering a clean room reverse engineering project of a
> > proprietary computer game, but i am unsure of the legality of doing
> > this especially of things like game maps and storyline.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

This page doesn't talk about software. Isn't copyright and trademarks
the real issues of game clones?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clone_%28computing%29 has the paragraph: 
   "Software can be cloned by reverse engineering or legal
reimplementation from documentation or other sources, or by observing a
program's appearance and behavior. The reasons for cloning may include
circumventing undesirable licensing fees or acquiring knowledge about
the features of the system. In the United States, the case of Lotus v.
Borland allows programmers to clone the public functionality of a
program without infringing its copyright."

If you intend to just reuse the idea, without using any original
material, that may be legal in some countries. IANAL.

Maybe this is more informative:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=26290&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraNews+%28Gamasutra+News%29

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