On September 22, 1986, a federal judge in the Northern District of California ruled that computer code embedded in a microprocessor’s microcode is protected by copyright law, in the case NEC Corp. v. Intel Corp. The dispute began when Intel accused NEC of copying the microcode inside its 8086 and 8088 processors to build NEC’s own competing V20 and V30 chips, even though the two companies had a licensing agreement covering earlier chip designs.
The ruling mattered because it settled, for the first time in a major case, that the low-level instructions burned into a chip’s control store count as a “computer program” under copyright law, just like the software running on top of it. That gave chipmakers real legal ground to protect their internal designs. But the decision cut both ways: the court also found that NEC’s later, independently rewritten microcode differed enough from Intel’s original to avoid infringement, and that Intel had actually forfeited copyright on some of its own code by failing to mark licensed “second-source” chips properly. The case became an early landmark for what’s now called clean-room design — reverse-engineering a product’s behavior without copying the underlying code — which is still how much of the chip and software industry legally builds compatible products today.
Source: This Day in Tech History, Justia (NEC Corp. v. Intel Corp., 645 F. Supp. 590)
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