On Thursday 19 July 2007 03:38, Timothy Normand Miller wrote: > > I can see this becoming a problem. In essence, we're just going to > have to work around this as best we can. Obviously, we can document > the pads on our board and their function, we can provide all the > Verilog code that controls the chip, and anything else that is > relevant to using the transmitters. They're relatively passive > devices, so the information we can provide openly (because it's our > stuff), should usually be enough. But in those cases where someone > needs additional documentation, we'll have to find a way to either > legally forward you a copy of the spec or simply make statements of > fact somewhere that answer the questions.
What kind of legal regime are we talking about here? The documentation itself is probably copyrighted, but we could circumvent that by doing a sort of cleanroom reverse engineering and producing our own documentation containing the same information, but without containing any of the original document. If the document was released on the web at some point then trade secrets do not apply. I don't see how a patent on the hardware could preclude anyone from distributing documentation, and trademarks can be avoided by calling the documentation a specification that any component used in that place on the board should adhere to, rather than documentation for a specific component by some manufacturer. So, if they pull the document but someone has the original, then why shouldn't we be able to create our own documentation of the component and distribute it? Lourens
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