> Corona Data Systems, Eagle Computer, and Handwell Corporation, were successfully sued by IBM for copyright infringement in 1984, and were forced to re-implement their BIOS in a way which did not infringe IBM's copyrights [1].

> To develop a legal BIOS, Phoenix used a clean room design [2].

I think there was some creative process in designing BIOS.

There is no difference between binary and text format, it is just a serialization. WASM text format and binary format. Java source and bytecode.

API documentation is certainly copyrightable, even text definition file. A lot of creative process goes to putting braces, spaces, commas, naming

    static double min(double a, double b)

versus

    static double
    min (double x, double y)

both would be valid reimplementation of java interface.

Yes, problem is copyright law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies