At 07:32 PM 2/26/2003 +0000, you wrote:
{Quote hidden}> >are externally complex enough that it's obvious if they were copied.
>..but something that provides conclusive proof to non-technical people
>(e.g. judge, jury etc. )
>can't hurt. Some years ago someone I know found out how good an idea this
>was - He'd filled spare
>areas of a ROM with random values, mainly to make it harder to
>dissasemble. A competitor copied it,
>changing obvious things like names. Because of the random blocks, it was a
>very simple matter to
>prove they copied it and the infringer settled before going to court.
Did the competitor actually break copy protection on a microcontroller or just
burn a copied EPROM on a microprocessor?
>If you can, say, press an obscure sequence of buttons and have a
>copyright message (mildly
>encrypted of course to hide it to anyone looking at the code) appear on a
>display (even a LED in
>morse code....!), at the very least it could save time and lawyers' fees....!
It also saves you from having to break copy protection on the competitor's
unit in order to determine for sure that its been copied! That could
actually be a criminal act in some jurisdictions.
Note that many ordinary data sheets (including uChip literature) are now
*legally* protected from modification (such as pulling pages out for
documentation) by the rather draconian DMCA legislation (in the US at
least). It's embedded, including a "criminal" warning, in the
PDFs.
Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
.....speffKILLspam
KILLspaminterlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
--
http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic:
[PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads
BY
:
Spehro Pefhany email (remove spam text)