and development. This established a precedent addressing the legal implications of commercial reverse engineering efforts. During production, Connectix unsuccessfully attempted a Chinese wall approach to reverse engineer the BIOS, so its engineers disassembled the object code directly. Connectix's successful appeal maintained that the direct disassembly and observation of proprietary code was necessary because there was no other way to determine its behavior. From the ruling: Some works are closer to the core of intended copyright protection than others. Sony's BIOS lay at a distance from the core because it contains unprotected aspects that cannot be examined without copying. The court of appeal therefore accorded it a lower degree of protection than more traditional literary works. In popular culture In the first season of the 2014 TV show Halt and Catch Fire, a key plot point from the second episode is how the fictional Cardiff Electric computer company placed an engineer in a clean room to reverse engineer a BIOS for its PC clone, to provide cover and protection from IBM lawsuits for a previous probably-illegal hacking of the BIOS code others at the company had performed. It reminded many critics of Compaq's million dollar clean-room engineering, but a contemporary, but far less successful company, Columbia Data Products, also used such an approach. The reaction of IBM's legal department, like other plot points, echoed the experiences of Corona Data Systems more closely. See also Code morphing References Further reading Computer law