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Author Topic: "Amiga" patents - what are they?  (Read 6765 times)

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Re: "Amiga" patents - what are they?
« on: August 05, 2009, 07:48:55 PM »
Quote from: Iggy;518114
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...

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Re: "Amiga" patents - what are they?
« Reply #1 on: August 05, 2009, 08:41:38 PM »
Quote from: Iggy;518125
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...

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Re: "Amiga" patents - what are they?
« Reply #2 on: August 05, 2009, 10:10:26 PM »
Quote from: persia;518136
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.