Chinese Wall

Definition - What does Chinese Wall mean?

Chinese wall is a reverse engineering and cloning technique that captures copyrighted and patented processes for reconstruction.

Chinese wall implementation provides a buffer against intellectual property infringement allegations via the clean room environment model specification implies that developers do not have access to competing intellectual property.

Chinese wall references the Great Wall of China, erected to protect against invasion. Many legal ethics experts condemn the Chinese wall term as linguistic discrimination.

Chinese Wall is also known as clean room design.

Techopedia explains Chinese Wall

Chinese wall separates reverse engineering and development teams to create a clean technology environment. Small competitors who have budget limitations or lack innovation may use the chinese wall method to compete with large product and technology enterprise counterparts.

In 1982, Columbia Data Products released the MPC 1600 - the first clone of IBM's basic input/output system (BIOS) - using the Chinese Wall technique. Another example is the Laser 128 by Video Technology Ltd. (VTech), which cloned the Apple IIc and managed to avoid litigation.This is due to the fact that the reverse engineering VTech used to copy Apple's technology was not found to violate Apple's patents or copyrights.

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