RE: [oc] Legal projects that can be worked on.

["Sam Gladstone" <samg@t-and-t.com>]

Here is my take on patents.

Well, with patents in the US system, it is allowed for a
person to study and implement a solution based on someone else's patent.
With the condition that if you sell the item, then you get a license for the
patent.
The patent holder is not required to sell you a license and therefore can
stop you from selling the implementation.
Patents were built to share technology for a price, a limited monopoly.

This is to our advantage as Opencores is a non profit group and
does not sell anything for a profit.

As long as you don't intend to sell the implementation, then you can
"research"
the idea as much as you want.  It would even be good to know if you ran into
a patented idea so that the OC group could try to invent around the patent,
release
the idea to which this would count as prior art preventing further
patenting.

What I want know is what is Copyrightable in the design world? Instruction
sets?
Signal names? Specs? Not sure how much protection a company can exert on
their
product or spec.

Regards,
  Sam Gladstone



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cores@opencores.org [mailto:owner-cores@opencores.org]On
Behalf Of Philipp Krause
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2001 4:11 AM
To: cores@opencores.org
Subject: Re: [oc] Legal projects that can be worked on.


Sam Gladstone wrote:

>I completely agree!
>If we know what is legal and what areas are not, then
>the group can be more focused on the right things.
>
How should we deal with different nation's laws? There are countries
that don't
have a DCMA equivalent yet. Some companys hold patents only valid in their
home countries.

Philipp Krause

>

--
To unsubscribe from cores mailing list please visit
http://www.opencores.org/mailinglists.shtml


--
To unsubscribe from cores mailing list please visit http://www.opencores.org/mailinglists.shtml