Comment Re: He should be incarcerated or worse (NOT) (Score 1) 63
Back in the late-60's and early-70's, when the Busicom 141-PF calculator software was written, United States copyright law was very different, you needed to explicitly mark a work with a copyright symbol, and register it with the U.S. Copyright Office. Nowadays everything is automatically protected by copyright law. Back then it was not. There was no copyright on the Busicom binaries, so this code is free-and-clear. The re-created "source code" was written without access to the original Busicom source code. In this sense it was done using techniques similar to a traditional "clean room".