I am afraid that it is you who evidently does not understand my point. I am not suggesting that some imbecile may transcribe in a manner to blindingly obvious that they may run into trouble. What I am suggesting is that access to the code for anyone with an IQ over 50 is a HUGE help in building your own version and that this assistance is not inhibited by copyright.
I am extremely familiar with clean room reverse engineering. You are absolutely mistaken if you believe that 'That's what you have to do to copy software without infringing its copyright.' Reverse engineering actually has a rather different history. Given a device, say a chip, take the inputs and outputs of said device which defines the machine's behavior. Now design and build a machine which reproduces such a mapping. This practice was frequently associated with 'clean room' protocols. The key point is that the team had absolutely NO access to the source code. And because such a clean room team would never hire anyone who had previously had such access they could be confidently said to have reverse engineered the behavior from the APIs alone. This is a VERY different situation.
I am extremely familiar with clean room reverse engineering. You are absolutely mistaken if you believe that 'That's what you have to do to copy software without infringing its copyright.' Reverse engineering actually has a rather different history. Given a device, say a chip, take the inputs and outputs of said device which defines the machine's behavior. Now design and build a machine which reproduces such a mapping. This practice was frequently associated with 'clean room' protocols. The key point is that the team had absolutely NO access to the source code. And because such a clean room team would never hire anyone who had previously had such access they could be confidently said to have reverse engineered the behavior from the APIs alone. This is a VERY different situation.