"Amiga" patents - what are they?

[Morley]

See thread title.

I'm thinking about the original Amiga patents and/or intellectual property coming from the original Commodore bankruptcy...

What exact areas does the patents cover? Anybody know? I tried googling but nowhere did I find anything useful - apart from some DMA patent from the late 80s.

This is purely out of curiosity - since everytime the Amiga intellectual property/patents have switched hands they have been "spoken highly" of.

[Tension]

Worthless

[Morley]

Worthless

That is also my thought, but it would be interesting to know what exactly they have/had...purely out of curiosity.

There has been so much talk about these patents, but nowhere can we find what they are about.

[Caius]

I seem to remember that they had patent on selecting multiple items from a menu at once. Or more likely, the way it was done on the Amiga.

[A1260]

Worthless

no shit sherlock!...

[Iggy]

At almost 25 years old, the question becomes are these patents still valid? If so could they be used as ammunition against current Amiga clone projects (like the Natami or Jens Schönfeld's project)?

[bloodline]

At almost 25 years old, the question becomes are these patents still valid? If so could they be used as ammunition against current Amiga clone projects (like the Natami or Jens Schönfeld's project)?

Not Valid in a legal sense... Certainly not valid in a technological sense...

[orb85750]

20 years patent lifetime, right?

[Iggy]

20 years patent lifetime, right?

Then the patents are not a restriction (they might be useful as technical reference material). The only real restriction becomes the copyrighted intellectual property (Kickstart, AOS, etc.).
So, is there a way to uncover the details of a old patent?

[bloodline]

Then the patents are not a restriction (they might be useful as technical reference material). The only real restriction becomes the copyrighted intellectual property (Kickstart, AOS, etc.).
So, is there a way to uncover the details of a old patent?

The old patents are for an implementation of an idea, since we don't want to sue that implementation anymore, I doubt there are any chip fabs left in the world that could build the original chips anymore, they are valueless... Best just do what has been done before with UAE, MiniMIG and Jens cloneA projects where you simply duplicate the functionality.

Yeah, the intellectual property is more difficult... Kickstart and AOS are both protected by copyright... but there is no law against cloning them... and thus AROS...

[Morley]

Hmm...I don't really care so much about the legal status or whether or not I'm allowed to use the patents, since I'm not at all considering cloning/building anything.

This is just plain curiosity. (Maybe the exact details are not out there in the public since it really is worth nada - while Amiga Inc. is pretending they are sitting on gold.)

[persia]

This should be an faq somewhere, the patents are dead, the copyright (on the OS) and trademark (Amiga) continue.  Lots of companies have no patents, Amiga Inc is just one of them.  It's the copyright that prevents you from cloning AmigaOS and the trademark that prevents you from calling it Amiga OS...

[Iggy]

Hmm...I don't really care so much about the legal status or whether or not I'm allowed to use the patents, since I'm not at all considering cloning/building anything.

This is just plain curiosity. (Maybe the exact details are not out there in the public since it really is worth nada - while Amiga Inc. is pretending they are sitting on gold.)

I can understand your curiosity (if available, the patents might lead to a clearer understanding of the Amiga's hardware and software systems).
As to Amiga Inc (and in particular Bill McEwan), I take any statements they make with a grain of salt. Amiga Anywhere seems rather pointless. Legal battles over Amiga OS4.x have hampered the development of future Amiga systems. Amiga OS5? No doubt, that's not going to happen unless they get the source to 4.0 (and then they'll probably be relying on their India subsidiary to create 5.0).
Frankly, even if their intellectual property has residual value, the longer they sit on it without developing it, the lower that value becomes.

[Morley]

Voila!

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=an%2Famiga%0D%0A&d=PTXT

This is just some of the patents from Commodore/Amiga.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&f=S&l=50&d=PTXT&RS=AN%2Famiga&Refine=Refine+Search&Refine=Refine+Search&Query=an%2Fcommodore

More, this time using Commodore as assignee, ignore the first results...

[bloodline]

This should be an faq somewhere, the patents are dead, the copyright (on the OS) and trademark (Amiga) continue.  Lots of companies have no patents, Amiga Inc is just one of them.  It's the copyright that prevents you from cloning AmigaOS and the trademark that prevents you from calling it Amiga OS...

Nothing prevents you from cloning AmigaOS... hence AROS and MorphOS... you just can't call it AmigaOS.

Copyright stops you from copying, as in physical copy (i.e. disk/rom chip/etc), but cloning is fine.