Joel Ewy skrev:
>"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.)
> 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?
The BoXeR motherboard, which has been due for release "real soon now" for the
last three years, has got an implementation of the AGA chipset in a kind of
programmable chip called Altiflex or something like that.
Didn't someone list some C= Amiga patents a short while back on the list?
--
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Received on Sun Apr 22 2001 - 19:59:50 BST