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cc-licenses - Re: What happens to the GPL in FPGA & VLSI implementations?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: What happens to the GPL in FPGA & VLSI implementations?
  • Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:12:28 -0500 (EST)


Rob Myers said:
> On Friday, March 18, 2005, at 04:48PM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com>
> wrote
>
>>Now, I'm not certain, but I THINK that distribution
>>of silicon does not qualify as distribution of the
>>work itself.
>
> IANAL, but the silicon could be regarded as the executable code to the
> work's
> source code, so this would possibly be "distribution".

Copyright law recently (well, on a relative scale of "recent")
added "masks" as one of the things that can be copyrighted.
And by masks, I mean the masks used create the various
layers on a die that is in a chip.

(i.e. you lay down a wafer of silicon, coat it with some
chemicals, put the mask over it, and expose it to light,
The chemicals react to the light and that allows you to
dip the wafer in etchant solution and remove the parts that
didn't get exposed. Repeat as needed until you build up all the
layers in a chip)

Apparently, before that was added to copyright law, masks
were considered purely functional. Now they are considered
a kind of "artwork". (Beauty being in the eye of the beholder
and all that)

I'm not sure if that therefore means that said artwork is
a derivative of the source code or not.

Since masks have their own specific piece in copyright law,
I think this is something that you need a copyright lawyer
to get a good answer for, because ultimately, it could depend
on how that specific piece of law was written to cover
masks under copyright.

I've heard of opencores.com but I've never used anything from
there (everything we do always seems to be non-standard,
so we roll our own version), but I would think they have
some legal explanation of what you can and cannot do with
their stuff.

Do they say the intent is that you can only use their stuff
if your whole chip is GNU-GPL?

Unfortunately, while GNU-GPL allows you to build your proprietary
code into GPL code if you do it locally on your machine, that is
an impossible condition with ASIC's that have $300,000 NRE's and
need high volumes to break even.

The only way you could do your local build is if you used
FPGA's and had your customers burn their own proms,
and while that may be possible, it is highly impractical.

Personally, I don't think copyright should extend to the point
where it restricts physical hardware. Copyright is in the
expression. And while there is expression in verilog describing
the chip, at some point it should switch over to the difference
between a recipe and a cake. The verilog is the recipe and the
chip is the cake. And while a book of recipes with someone's
specific expression can be copyrighted, that should not prevent
a cook from using the recipe to make cookies and sell them.

If cookies are a derivative of some recipe book,
we are all in for a world of trouble.

Contrarwise, I don't think patents should extend to the point
where it restricts abstract software. but that's another debate.






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