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Message
From: Günter Dannoritzer<dannoritzer@w...>
Date: Tue Oct 2 13:26:51 CEST 2007
Subject: [oc] patents and logic cores
Thanks Richard for that great explanation.Richard Tierney wrote:
[...]
>
> The situation is exactly the same today. Different national governments
> have different standards for what constitutes an 'invention' (in the US,
> for example, you can get a patent on a perpetual motion machine, among
> many other other absurd things), but national law still does not, and
> cannot, extend across national frontiers. If you want to patent an
> 'invention', you first start by finding out where your markets are, and
> then you take out national patents in those markets. Some countries may
> allow a monopoly for an 'international' patent of some sort (a European
> patent, for example); that's a decision that is made by the government
> of that country.
>
This is were I feel it is getting hairy. To figure out what does really
apply to my case.
I give you an example. I am looking for a pipelined FFT processor for my
opencores project. Doing a google search the first hit is this paper:
http://ipdps.cc.gatech.edu/1996/PAPERS/S19/HE/HE.PDF
It really explains the processor well and also is a very efficient in
terms of FPGA usage. Now guess what, it is protected by a US patent and
doing a search on the EPO page it has a EPO publication number assigned
and is registered with the World IP Organization.
Now I know that in Europe algorithms cannot really be patented so far
and me living in Germany the US patent would not really affect me. But
with all this motion at the moment about the intellectual property laws
getting unified all over Europe I am a bit unsure what all this other
stuff with the world IP organization has to do with it.
> Back to your questions:
>
> 1 - the location of a 'server', whatever that is, can make no
> difference. All that matters is commercial exploitation. Note that, if
> you give something away for free in a territory in which a patent-holder
> has a commerical monopoly right, then they clearly have a case against
> you, but only in that territory.
Yes, that is where I thought the server location would come in. For
example, if the server is hosted in the US, the company could forbid to
publish the project because of the patent law in that country, where as
when the server would be in another country, US law would not really
have an influence on it.
[...]
>
> 4 - If it's not already obvious, and to elmininate any confusion: you
> can do anything you want with the information contained in a national
> patent but, if you infringe the inventor's monopoly rights in that
> country, you may end up in a court in that country, if you let them
> catch you.
And this is were it becomes complicated with opencores, as a project is
public available. So it becomes important to check first before causing
some violation.
So there are actually two ways to look at it from an opencores
development project. One is from the developers point of view. What laws
are valid for the developer or the team of developers.
The other question is what laws would apply to a user of that project.
I guess it is not the task of the developers on opencores to verify all
national laws and whether their implementation would violent one of them.
So what is the recommendation here? I guess for a development team,
check that your national laws are met?
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