I'm not entirely sure of that. If you would have two teams though, it would. Team A creates a spec of the protocol, and Team B implements a connection lib based on the spec created by Team A.
Europe tends to be pretty good through, copyright wise.
Yes, clean-room reimplementations are legal everywhere. The problem with this code is it's not clean room. This leaves commercial users open to serious accusations of copyright infringement (as in, criminal prosecution.) See my comments in the thread. IANAL and my analysis is based on the README of the project.
Europe tends to be pretty good through, copyright wise.