alt Hacker NewsSure, USA citizens are not allowed to reverse engineer
...yes we are? After all, that's how the whole IBM PC-compatible industry started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies#Cloning_t...
AFAIK the later Thinkpads including this one uses a Phoenix BIOS, so it's amusing to see the circularity of how things turned out; and continuing on that path, Phoenix sold its BIOS business to Lenovo a little earlier this year.
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As with many things, this is a case of "it depends" - How you do it and for what reason, primarily. If you're reverse engineering code that's part of a DRM scheme for example, that's explicitly not allowed.
Coreboot is debatable for this, it's fine in the sense that nobody is going to come after you for it, but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement, which is fundamentally different to the Phoenix BIOS clone, and not in a good way.
But as I said, nobody is going to come after you for it so...
Yeah, it's pretty cut and dry. Constitutionally, only the federal government is allowed to regulate intellectual property, so re-implementing anything that isn't protected by a trademark, copyright, or patent is fair game, and trademarks don't cover design, copyright only covers media, and patents expire in 20 tears.
Even the clean-room isolation that Phoenix went through isn't legally required, it just makes nuisance lawsuits more difficult. BSD prevailed over UNIX System Laboratories, in their reimplementation of Unix, despite having directly worked with the source code.