Electronic – Moral Designs – Or – My Parts Match Your Parts

design

So I was designing a front end for a 16bit ADC and had settled on a design and preliminary values. I decided to google around and see if any other designs could help me make things better when I stumbled upon a project that used the exact same parts with the exact same intent but with different descrete values.

This project I found was for an old product from 2004 that the company had open sourced the hardware for but previously it was closed source.

My question is simple. When you are designing something and it is very close to a competitors design and you are both using that design for the same purpose, are you liable for intilectual property infringement? I do not want to design something and start selling it to find out a year later bigOrg LTD. Holds IP rights on that "style & usage" of said part and I owe them $5M…

This might not seem to happen that often but I have run into it twice so far. I designed a logic analizer and to scale the unknown 0-7V input into the TTL range of my buffer I made a 1M/5M/1M divider between 5V and GND, input with a 330ohm resistor and 10pf cap to my buffer. I got to these values using spice and making a way to really ram in a logic change without going over specs. About 6 months later my buddy sent me a hack on the ZeroPlus Logic Cube and they use that exact layout with only two resistors of different value.

Best Answer

I Am Not A Lawyer, but...

the usual run of intellectual property divides into these areas:

  • patents (government-granted monopoly of a method or system for accomplishing particular functions that are non-obvious, useful, and novel)
  • copyrights (right to prevent others from using identical design elements)
  • trademarks (government-registered brand names / logos)
  • trade secrets (ideas kept secret, no legal protection here)

Unless you have a patent on a particular functional piece of circuitry, or you can prove that someone else made an effort to copy widespread portions of your schematic/layout/software, it would be difficult to keep someone else from using similar circuit elements. (And the same for them to prevent you from doing so.)

Resistor dividers + capacitors probably don't meet either criterion (although the US Patent Office has granted patents for things that are more obvious), so I wouldn't worry about it.

If you're talking about more complex ideas, you should probably talk to an attorney who specializes in intellectual property law.

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