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He could make a business out of that by replicating retro chips. Some chips are not easy to get and I bet vintage computing fans would pay enough so that a bus
by Wronnay 5y ago
He could make a business out of that by replicating retro chips.
Some chips are not easy to get and I bet vintage computing fans would pay enough so that a business in that area could be profitable.
- andi999 5y agoCopyright might be a problem.
- tagoregrtst 5y agoThats an interesting comment. IANAL but The patent, how you’d typically protect the chips, have long expired. But the chip could have been protected as a work of art under copyright. However that would cover only a very similar layout of the transistors. Functionally identical chips wouldn't be covered even if they weren’t re-created from scratch. Didnt Nintendo do something similar with the MOS6502?
- krallja 5y agoNintendo partnered with Ricoh to put a Z80 in the NES, like Coleco and Sega, but Ricoh didn’t have the license to produce Z80s and didn’t think they would be able to reverse engineer it quickly enough. But they did have a reverse-engineered 6502 clone with the patented bits removed, and US copyright law didn’t cover IC lithography yet, and would they be interested in that instead?
- tagoregrtst 5y agoSo old chips arent covered since cppyright didnt extend to lithography. Either way, change the lithography keeping the chip electrically the same and you’re good to go
- 0xcde4c3db 5y agoChip layouts are typically covered by a separate copyright-like regime with different rules (most notably a much shorter period of exclusivity) [1]. I believe the original NMOS 6502 and the derived Nintendo/Ricoh 2A03 both predate these laws, so Ricoh only had to worry about patent infringement. That being said, many chips also contain code (e.g. firmware, microcode) that is potentially eligible for copyright independently of the chip layout. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_design_protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_desi...
- nobodyandproud 5y agoClean room reverse engineering is pretty standard and legal. It’s how IBM PC clones were legitimate back in the 1980s; and how AMD managed to stay on the legal side when taking on Intel.
- kragen 5y agoChip design mask works only last 20 years, and they probably aren't copyrightable.