Amiga Inc AGA patents?

[psxphill]

Once we're sure the patents have expired would it be ok to clone the chips? All the parts are getting old and we will be needing replacements.

What do you mean by "cloned".
 
There is nothing inherent in the patent system that prevents you cloning a chip as a patent only covers how the design works. Patenting a chip doesn't stop someone from producing something that is pin compatible, it just has to work in a different way (depending on what is patented the chip could have seemingly identical characteristics).
 
If you actually want to make a copy of the chip by photographing the original mask, then that isn't a patent issue but a mask rights issue.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_design_protection
 
copyright doesn't cover masks because there is no artistic merit to them, but since 1989 you do get rights for up to 15 years to prevent people making copies.
 
The CPU in the NES was produced prior to this coming in and the chip was cloned by NEC(?) de-capping the 6502 and photographing it and then cutting out the bits that were patented (like decimal mode).
 
It seems strange that this type of practice went on. A lot of chips were produced by multiple companies as second sources, because some manufacturers wouldn't buy a chip that was only produced by one company, as they could end up with supply problems. I don't know whether they just had to pay to license the patents.

[psxphill]

a yearly fee must be paided to keep a patent (with a maximum of 20 years).

That isn't necessarily true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintenance_fee_(patent)
 
"Maintenance fees on utility patents in the United States are due 3½, 7½ and 11½ years after grant of the patent.[19] No maintenance fees are due while an application is pending.[20] Design patents and plant patents are not subject to maintenance fees at all."
 
You can also game the system to get more than 20 years, I believe some of the mp3 patents haven't expired yet because of this.
 
 
I doubt old commodore patents are what you need to watch out for with an FPGA Amiga, there are plenty of other patents filed that you could easily violate though (and you don't have to know that they exist to violate them).

[psxphill]

So the Amiga ROMs are also "free" now?
(I wonder where the rights to them went)
 
 
 
Do you mean submarine patents?

Amiga roms are still covered by copyright, someone will own them even if the copyright owners go through liquidation as they are an asset that would get sold.
 
submarine patents wasn't the specific method I was referring to, because I believe they tightened that up. But there are other ways that have the same effect. I'm not a patent laywer though.

[psxphill]

Seems like the chain is Commodore -> Escom -> Gateway -> Amino Development.
The latter then renamed themself to Amiga Inc. And that seems to be where the copyright lies.

You'd have to go through the contracts, for example Amino may only have licensed the software and not transferred ownership of the copyright from Gateway.

[psxphill]

You may be right. The problem is the lack of information on this issue. There's not even an official duty to register like there is for patents.

With patent you need to check your idea hasn't been patented before, so you need a central repository.
 
With copyright you are supposed to assume you're not allowed to copy something unless you have the right to do so. If you want to license something but can't find the original owner, then it's likely they don't want to license it to you.
 
You could probably instruct a lawyer to contact the relevant parties though.

[psxphill]

The issue is that you can not accept the words of the attorneys as fact. I'll let you decide if that is due to expressing rights in terms of the interests of their clients or if they really just do not know. In the end, only a test in court determines these rights, or so I am told.

Yes, a court is the only real test. However that will only happen if someone decides to pursue litigation against you.
 
If you have instructed a licensed attorney to draw up a contract with whoever they deem to own the rights, then if they were wrong then you sue the attorney and the person you licensed from. If you show you acted in good faith then the court are less likely to throw the book at you.

[psxphill]

So the evil masterplan is to write a license contract with someone that claim they own the copyright and then when it's tried in court you can blame-someone-else ..? A complication is if that company is empty for money and your own company would then by demanded to provide compensation.
 
In essence if one has the financial resources and will to take the gamble one can make "legal" use of these ROMs.

You are likely to have to pay compensation in either way, but damages for wilful disregard is likely to be higher.
 
You wouldn't just find a random person, you'd need to get an attorney to follow the trail. They might not be able or willing to do that, or you might not be willing to pay their fee. If it goes wrong then you can always sue your attorney for mal-practise.
 
To make legal use of the roms will always take financial resources, even if commodore were still operating.

[psxphill]

At least AROS-m68k is not good enough for the UAE emulator for Unix. But I read that it should work on FPGA Replay.

The last time I heard the major problem was speed, graphics.library/HID were designed around a fast processor and vga and not 68000 and ocs/ecs/aga.
 
I'm hoping that a new driver architecture will be created at some point that solves that.

[psxphill]

The last I read on AROS-68k in UAE was that it got stuck on serial or parallell port initialization with a black screen.

There are a lot of posts online of people running aros68k in uae in 2012.
 

How can graphics.library/HID be designed for VGA when classic Amiga in many cases were fully dependent on PAL/NTSC ..?

I'm referring to the AROS implementation of graphics.library, HID is the AROS device interface. By designed for VGA, I mean an actual VGA card sitting in a PC and not the 60hz/31khz video output that it produces.

[psxphill]

But most games only need AmigaOS/AROS to boot and configure the machine making AROS 68k rather useful for running games

I think it's a bit of a waste if AROS is just used for that though.

[psxphill]

If you mean MS-Windows WinUAE..

And supposedly on AROS x86 uae.
 

You must mean AROS on x86 or so.

AROS on any platform uses the same graphics.library that wasn't designed to be fast on OCS/ECS/AGA.