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Clean room reverse engineering always involves a wall of some kind between the person figuring out how the tech works, and the person creating the new tech. Usually the wall is only allowing one-way communication via a specification of the behavior of the old tech, perhaps reviewed by a lawyer to ensure nothing copyrighted leaks across.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall

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Thanks for those links, I read a couple of the cited comments on those cases and still cannot find any mentions of restrictions for engineers who at some point in the past had access to the code.

Nordstrom Consulting v. M&S Technologies, which is possibly the most relevant case, describes a process for developing under a clean room environment and from what I understand it seems to focus on isolation of engineering teams and resources (except when required for interoperability). I did not find mentions of assessing the cohort of engineers for prior access to the copyrighted material but if I have missed that please let me know.

I also wanted to say that I am not asking this because I am thinking to start an unethical license laundering business, I am only trying to understand the meaning of making LLMs legally equivalent to human workers.

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