I don't know the details involved, but 'copyright' being in the code memory does not exclude it. This has been proven in court - See Sony V. Connectix. Connectix made a Playstation emulator for PC. In doing so, they dissected a PS bios and used it. Sony sued, connectix won, and sony decided to forget it and bought them outright :)
But anyway, I thought this would fall under the category of "noteworthy exceptions"...