Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

drew Roberts said:

> What is the difference between embedded
> software and hardware. They are both
> unchangeable pieces of silicon are they
> not? (Or at least they can be. Right?)

Embedded software is on a ROM instead of
on a CD. Both are a matter of expression
in a medium rather than implementations
of chemistry.

Copyright covers the expression,
not the implementation.
You can enforce copyright on your expression
whether it is written in ink on paper,
oil on canvas, a CD ROM, or bits in a ROM.

A cake is a matter of chemistry.
You cannot copyright a cake.
Hardware is metaphorically cake.

You cannot copyright hardware.
You cannot copyright functionality.
That is the only thing that allows
Open Source Software to implement the
same functionality as Microsoft.
Without it, Open Office would not be
able to read/write a MS-Word document.

Thinking about it now, I just realized that
you cannot copyright a recipe for cake.

You can, however, copyright a "recipe" for hardware.
The verilog code that expresses or describes the
hardware can be copyrighted.

What I do NOT know with any certainty is whether
or not copyright applies to the "cake" you "bake"
when you convert the recipe to silicon.

A silicon die is about chemistry/physics,
actual implementation of the expression,
similar to the way a cake implements the recipe.

I'd say that silicon should NOT be copyrightable,
although I would allow someone to copyright their
particular masks. But I would treat a mask
as something OTHER than a derived work of the
code/recipe it came from. I'd treat it as an
original work.

But, again, that's just me.

What it comes down to is a copyright lawyer
who is familiar with asic design needs to
answer the question. The law can be arbitrary
in what it chooses, so no one can just
infer what it "should" be from simple logic.