Because of the extreme number of patents, and the broad way
in which they are written, the probability is very high that
any electronic device made is infringing on at least one patent.

If companies behave as good corporate citizens, and put out
their schematics, source code, and other documentation, they
are essentially begging to be sued for patent infringement.

If they keep the schematics and other documentation as a
closely held secret, it makes it much harder, and in some cases
illegal, to find out if they have infringed your patents.

Innovation through litigation!

-Chuck Harris

Alan Scrimgeour wrote:

Chuck,

" in some cases illegal "

How do you figure that?

Best,
-John

===============

Hi John,

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act aka DMCA, makes it illegal
to decode, disassemble, or decompile any protected work.  So
basically, if you take a piece of software, or hardware and
figure out how it works, you have probably violated the DMCA.

Everything is illegal these days.

-Chuck Harris

J. Forster wrote:

Interesting, but I wonder what trumps what:

"I dissassembled your code to find out you violated my IP rights" v. fruit
of the poisoned tree.

That says effectively you can steal IP, protect it w/ your copyright, and
get away scott free. I doubt it works that way.

FWIW,
-John

===============

That's a pretty substantial exaggeration of what the DMCA says.  The
anticircumvention provision applies only to "technological measures"
used to control access to a "work protected under this title"

Between the definitions in the statute and the cases decided under it,
it's clear that

(a) a "technological measure" is one that is intended to protect the
work from unauthorized access, not simple compilation or assembly;

(b) a "work protected under this title" means a work that qualifies for
copyright protection ("title" is referring to Title 17 of the US Code,
which deals with copyright only), and physical items are not
copyrightable to the extent it is functional or utilitarian;

(c) software or a data stream must meet the copyright act's criteria for
"creativity" to be protected by DMCA (one case held that a garage door
remote control's codes were not protected by the DMCA because they were
not copyrightable); and

(d) the US statutory "fair use" defense is still available, although
admittedly some recent cases (the RealDVD case in particular) may make
it less useful, at least for circumvention-makers.

The DMCA is bad, but it does not go nearly as far as you are saying it does.

John

Chuck Harris wrote:

Hi John,

John Ackermann N8UR wrote:

I know you are a lawyer, and I'm not, but I think DMCA applies in more ways
than you may imagine.  I'll give you some examples:

I was once contracted to figure out how to use non Toshiba disk drives on
Toshiba computers.  I looked in all the logical places, and with the exception
of parts of the BIOS that were reverse engineered from IBM's, the entire rest
of the BIOS was gibberish.

Toshiba had encrypted all of their additions to the bios to prevent them from
being read.  Their system decrypted the BIOS and loaded it into memory where
it was run... not hard to circumvent, but it did add a layer of trickiness
to the process.

If I did this job today, I am certain that the DMCA would consider my cracking
of the encryption routine to be circumventing a technological measure intended
to protect the work from unauthorized access.

Once upon a time, I bought a PCB milling machine.  With the machine came
original disks for the software that translated Gerber files to the CAM
files needed to mill around the circuit traces and isolate them.  Somehow,
the dongle that was used in the copy protection scheme got lost, and I figured
that I would simply circumvent it.  Only thing is, the dongle was used as an
encryption device, and substantial parts of the software on the disk were
passed through decryption routines that converted gibberish into the code
that ran in the machine.

I am certain that if I cracked that code today, I would be in violation of
the DMCA.

Another example, several, if not all of the current crop of FPGA's use a
hardware encryption routine in the chip to prevent unauthorized tools from
being able to program the chip.  The manufacturers say the encryption is
there to protect the customers IP from being stolen, and perhaps it serves
that purpose.

I believe that if I were to crack the encryption algorithm, and gain access
to the customer's code, I would be in violation of the DMCA, as breaking the
encryption would be circumventing a technological measure intended to protect
the work from unauthorized access.

What do you think?  Would these examples would be violations of the DMCA?

Ok, how does this apply?  Suppose I held some patents, and I believed that
it was likely that the codes in the above examples contained infringements
of my patents.  I would have to circumvent the same protection routines in
order to determine if the code, or logic contained my patented property.
If I did so, and I found infringements, could I be prosecuted for violating
the DMCA?  What if I did so, and didn't find infringements?

This is my point.  I believe the DMCA can protect patent infringer's from
having their infringements detected by the IP owners.

Not providing documentation on instruments further helps hide infringements.

-Chuck Harris

Ah, right: IP = Intellectual Property. I guess they might just be worried
about people stealing their design too, plus, if they can get customers to
accept not having schematics for whatever reason, they get a monopoly on
repairs.

Seems like I'm going to have to resort to reverse engineering - hope the pcb
doesn't have more than 2 layers!

Alan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Harris" cfharris@erols.com
To: "Discussion of precise voltage measurement" volt-nuts@febo.com
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2010 9:01 PM
Subject: Re: [volt-nuts] Keithley 2001 Multimeter Fault

The little functionality the meter had when I got it enabled me to start a
self test, but now I can't even do that as functionality has dropped away
rapidly. The display is fine and presumably the processor driving it, but it
no longer responds to the keyboard.

A smell of overheating plastic after a few minutes lead me to an LM2940CT -
5 volt regulator. It's located in the fan assisted cooling path but getting
far too hot even allowing for that. It's output voltage is well below 5V.
It's input voltage appeared to be reasonable given it's being overloaded, so
I conclude that either the LM2940CT is faulty or more likely, something is
overloading its output. A circuit diagram would show me what connects to
this output so I can start searching for the culprit.

Alan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Laurence Motteram" LMotteram@scientific-devices.com.au
To: "Discussion of precise voltage measurement" volt-nuts@febo.com
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2010 9:34 PM
Subject: Re: [volt-nuts] Keithley 2001 Multimeter Fault