Acceptance policy · Clean Rewrite

We accept

✓

Your own program, with the source lostWritten by you or for you, and you hold the rights.

✓

Abandoned or end-of-life toolsThe rightsholder has consented, no longer exists, or didn't answer a documented request.

✓

InteroperabilityReading, writing or speaking a file format or protocol so your systems can work together.

✓

Black-box-only rebuildsSpecified purely from using the software, its screens, files and outputs, with no decompilation at all.

We refuse

DRM or licence-check bypassIf the scan or the spec team finds one, the job stops.

Game cheats, malware and offensive tools

Copyleft relicensingRewriting open-source code to change its licence. Its source is likely in the model's training data, so the clean room wouldn't be clean.

Brand or look-and-feel clonesWe rebuild behaviour, not someone else's name or trade dress.

US targets under a no-reverse-engineering licenceUnless your counsel signs off first. US courts enforce these clauses.

Unclassified export-controlled crypto

How we work

The spec comes mainly from black-box observation: running the program and recording what it does.
Decompilation is limited to file formats and interfaces, and every spec fact is tagged with where it came from.
The original runs only inside the VM or Docker image you provide, in isolated copies with no access to your network or live data.
The build team runs in a separate sandbox and never receives the binary or any decompiled code. What each side could see is hashed and logged.
The work is done by AI agents driving decompilers (such as Ghidra), UI automation and test tools, with people reviewing the spec and the code.
Every question between the teams is reviewed and recorded. That includes automated "oracle" requests, where the build side asks what the original does with an input and gets back only the expected result.
A human engineer reviews and edits the result, and that is recorded too.
Before the build, you sign off a test suite with results recorded from the original. "Working" means passing those tests.

The legal basis

EU	A lawful user may observe, study and test a program, and a contract can't remove that right (Directive 2009/24, Art. 5(3)). Decompilation is allowed only for interoperability (Art. 6).
Functionality	What a program does, its file formats and its programming language aren't protected by copyright (SAS Institute v World Programming, C-406/10).
UK	CDPA s.50B and s.296A mirror the EU rules.
US	Reverse engineering to reach functional elements can be fair use (Sega v Accolade, Sony v Connectix), but licence terms banning it are enforceable (Bowers v Baystate).
Clean room	Independent creation defeats a copying claim, if you can prove it. That proof is the audit pack.

This page explains our policy. It isn't legal advice. For jobs where it matters, add a lawyer's sign-off on the spec.

What a clean room doesn't cover

Patents: independent creation is no defence.
Trade secrets, where your contract bans reverse engineering.
Trademarks, trade dress and slavish imitation.
Circumventing DRM or copy protection.
Export control on cryptography.

What you promise us

You're a lawful licensee or owner of the program, and you've told us the licence terms.
You'll cover us if that turns out not to be true.
Our liability is capped at the job price. We give no patent indemnity and no warranty of copyright in the output; we assign all rights we have in it, if any.