I don't really understand the first episode. The idea as far as I can tell is that it's illegal to use employees who reverse engineered the BIOS to clone the BIOS, but it's legal to hire someone new, who presumably is also going to have to reverse engineer the BIOS in order to clone it.
The idea is that specifications are not copyrightable, but implementations are. So, the first team reverse engineers the work and writes a spec for the second team to work from. That way, you guarantee that the second implementation is free of copyrighted code.
