Legal Status of Amiga Clones (past and present)

[alexh]

The only thing up for debate is that Commodore published an Amiga Hardware Reference Manual in 1990(?) which describes the inner workings of the Amiga in English.

If you are to publish a "translation" of this book into another language (i.e. VHDL/Verilog) there is a slim chance they could go after you for copyright infringement.

But realistically no-one is going to care unless you make some serious money.

Some companies sell 68000 clones for FPGA and there are several open source 68000 clones for FPGA and Freescale has done nothing. That said no-one has tried to make a competitive ASIC chip. ARM and MIPS have successfully prevented people making clones of their chips but they are not quite as old.

I suspect that 90% of KS chips sold today are sold illegally. I wonder who has licenses to produce EPROMs these days and what and how they pay?

[alexh]

I think that is open to interpretation. If copyright can protect the characters, places and themes in books and films, why not registers and their descriptions in a hardware reference manual?

The subject is kinda mute as no-one is going to produce anything

[alexh]

If anyone was considering selling anything Amiga related do not rely on any posts on this forum (or any other) about legal issues. Consult an IP & copyright lawyer.