[asterisk-dev] Asterisk Appliance?

[Steve Underwood]

Steve Kennedy wrote:

>On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 12:01:48PM -0500, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
>
>  
>
>>----- Steve Underwood <steveu at coppice.org> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I think the schematic itself has copyright, like any other document.
>>>Its 
>>>the circuit which the schematic describes which has no copyright 
>>>protection. This is like not being able to xerox a page from an atlas,
>>>but sketching the map it contains is OK. For practical purposes, this
>>>means much the same thing as there being no copyright on the
>>>schematic. 
>>>However, I think its important to get these details right, or they
>>>seem 
>>>confusing. Why would this document itself not be protected, while all
>>>others are?
>>>      
>>>
>>I (not being a lawyer either) believe you are correct; the same applies to PC board layouts. The layout itself is a copyrightable work, but the circuit description it embodies is not. As Robin already stated, ideas cannot be copyrighted, only the expression of the idea can be copyrighted.
>>    
>>
>
>Think of the Sparc V CPU (I think it's the V), Sun open sourced it's
>design - well they actually open sourced the layout code (Verilog or
>some other chip design package). Whether that's actually any use to
>anybody is another matter.
>  
>
Things like VHDL and Verilog code are treated like programming language 
code. They are protecetd by copyright, like any computer program. This 
leads to oddities, like you can't protect a board full of logic chips, 
but you can protect the contents of an FPGA which performs exactly the 
same function as that board.

Steve