"Eric J. Korpela" wrote:
> > > This brings to mind the fact that (at least the first of) the
> > > Amiga patents should be expiring within the next two or three years.
> > > This should mean something to Amiga hobbyists, shouldn't it? I've
> > > seen people implementing 6502 cores in FPGAs these days. Surely the
> > > Amiga custom chips would be good candidates for similar treatment when
> > > Gateway no longer has the right to sue somebody to make them quit.
> > > (Gateway still owns the patents even though they no longer own the
> > > Amiga trademark. What they plan to do with them in the next couple
> > > years -- aside from keeping others from making good use of them -- is
> > > beyond me.)
> >
> > Aren't the designs, which are what really matter here, still copyrighted?
>
> Copyright doesn't preclude other designs which perform equivalent tasks.
> A reverse engineered version of a custom chip is perfectly legal under
> copyright law despite recent attempts by congress to make it illegal.
>
> Under patent law it would not be, if the chip is similar enough to fall
> under the specifics of the patent (as would surely be the case in this
> instance.)
>
> Eric
That's my understanding as well. There are (or at least have been) at
least two Amiga clone motherboards developed in the post-Commodore era, but I
believe that those use the same custom chips that the actual Amiga hardware
used. As the supply of those chips necessarily dwindles, it would seem that
people could replicate their functionality in high density programmable logic
(FPGAs and whatnot) in order to make compatible designs, but for the patents.
Actually, I seem to remember hearing that some of the Amiga patents were
software patents -- can anybody confirm that?
--
Joel Ewy
mailto:ewy_at__nospam_southwind.net
http://www2.southwind.net/~ewy
Received on Sun Apr 22 2001 - 14:19:55 BST