Microsoft famously has patents covering aspects of the ribbon interface in Microsoft office, which of course this suite must implement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_(user_interface)#Patent...
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has a policy that says screenshots of applications have to be "as small a version as possible" in order to meet the fair use exception for presentation of copyright work. I can only imagine an exact clone of the interface could be similarly ruled to infringe on Adobe's intellectual property.
I'm not sure how clean room would apply to commercial applications distributed in binary form, as there's no way to look at even disassembled code without violating the license agreement and therefore being in breach of contract and subject to potential copyright infringement claims for copying or even continuing to use the software, let alone cloning it, and surely you're not going to be subject to a copyright claim based on familiarity with the application from merely using it.
The reason why 'reverse engineering' has gotten so good is because what we're actually seeing is fully automated luxury plagiarism
It doesn’t matter. It’s likely had access to the knowledge of somebody who worked on that source code.
I have worked at companies that have done clean-room implementations. I was not permitted to look at their source or interact with those teams, because I had been exposed to the source of what they were re-implementing in a prior job.
As a human with a mushy brain I was never going to remember the source, but the fact I had been proximate to it was enough to lock me out. You have no idea what the LLM trained on, so you can’t prove a LLM derived clone is a “clean-room” implementation.
Wouldn't the burden of proof here be on Adobe if they wanted to make such an argument?
And I don't think that is publicly known at the current time. (If anyone has any tangible info on this, the please let me know...)
It's considerably faster than their apps (at startup) too.