bill@hp-pcd.UUCP (Bill Frolik) (08/27/83)
#R:nsc:-35900:hp-pcd:41500001:000:2077 hp-pcd!bill Aug 26 11:09:00 1983 I'm no lawyer, but ... As far as I know, you can design/build anything you want if it's for your personal use (i.e., not to be marketed), especially if it's your own unique design. And if your design is unique (i.e., you didn't build a terminal that is an exact copy, circuit-for-circuit, of the VT100 or something) I don't think there's anything patentwise or copyrightwise restricting you from publishing an article about it. I think your biggest concern should be in the area of "conflict of interest" with your company. If what you build could potentially directly compete with something your company builds, and you decide to try to sell it, you'll probably have a problem, depending on your company's stand on such issues. Some firms forbid it; others are a bit nicer and may let you market your design if you first offer it to your own company and they turn you down. You should probably check with your company's legal people. (They may have policies about your writing articles as well.) In the event that you come up with something unique (not a blatent copy) and your company does not object to you marketing it, you should become concerned with possible patent infringments. There are a lot of strange and subtle things that have been patented, and something that may have been totally obvious and not seemed tricky or unique to you in your design may turn out to be patented by some other individual or company (I think a good example of this is the company [RCA I believe, but could be wrong] that patented the scheme of putting ascii character codes into a ROM, generating the serial video bit stream needed to form dot matrix characters on a raster-scan monitor; it may seem like the obvious way to do it, and almost *everybody* who makes terminals does it that way, and almost everybody who is doing it is paying a royalty on it!) Anyway, I think that as long as what you design/build is for yourself you can do most anything you please; if you want to market it, though, you'd probably best talk with a legal expert. bill frolik hp-pcd!bill
mark@umcp-cs.UUCP (08/29/83)
As another interesting example of a patent, Dennis Ritchie
holds a patent on the Unix file protection scheme
(the rwx for me, my group, and others). I have a copy--
it is all implemented (or appears to be implemented)
in hardware.
--
spoken: mark weiser
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