On Saturday, April 29, 2023 at 6:09:52 PM UTC+1, Anton Ertl wrote:
> EricP <
ThatWould...@thevillage.com> writes:
> >I do wonder just what is being licensed with an "architectural license"
> >as any new design (microarchitecture) would be the designer's own I.P.
> >and I don't think an ISA can be protected by copyright or patent.
if represented as mathematics - which it is - no an ISA may not
be Copyrighted. the document *containing* the descriptive words
may be made Copyright, but the *mathematical concepts* may not.
(i used this loophole to extract the *concept* of the Power ISA
into machine-readable form, despite the implementations being
IBM Copyright CC 4.0 Licensed in the case of Microwatt, and
directly from the Power ISA 3.0 Specification - IBM Copyright
at the time - now the Copyright of the OpenPOWER Foundation).
except those fucking morons Oracle tried to do exactly that:
consider an "API" to be "Copyrightable" which given that ISAs are
a form of an "API", it would have meant that retrospectively
every single ISA suddenly became Copyright material. which
would have been a serious world-wide fuckup. so deeply
irresponsible and greedy that they decided "Java APIs" were
Copyrighted material, absolutely no thought whatsoever for
the devastating consequences *including for themselves*.
boo hoo hoo.
> It seems that the industry agrees that an ISA can be monopolized
> ("protected") in some way.
Trademark Law. the *name* of the ISA may be protected.
if you rename the ISA and *in no way* make *any* mention of
its origins (no "this is ARM-like" or "this is ARM-compatible")
you get away with it. of course, you are highly likely in any
implementation to run smack into a shit-load of patents (not
just from ARM but from Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, IBM, Samsung)
but that is another matter entirely.
> What I imagine is that individual
> instructions are patented;
no, any special innovations of the *implementation* underneath the
instruction it may be patented.
> ARM has some innovative ones in the A64 instruction set,
*snort*.
> Maybe the encoding is monopolized in some way. Could it be copyright?
no. it's an API (effectively).
> Maybe the argument is that the decoder in the CPU core is a
> derived work of the copyrighted encoding.
which cannot be copyrighted because it is a mathematical
concept (and an API).
a particularly efficient *implementation* - a novel *decoder* -
may be patented.
> Given the difference in revenue between Apple and ARM, it seems to me
> that ARM has real teeth,
no, Trademark Law does. Apple - unlike Qualcomm - has respect
for Trademark Law. they don't want *their* Trademark disrupted,
they are on shaky enough ground with the word "apple" as it is.
l.