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Re: [oc] legal advice



Since I am not a lawyer, I was going to stay out of this thread. But 
given Jean Masson's reply, I feel compelled to comment.

There are three entirely separate issues, here. Trademarks, Patents and 
Copyrights.

While you might win a legal case against MIPS over their Trademarks, it 
is very unlikely ("Windows" and "Access" are very generic terms too, 
yet Microsoft was able to trademark those) and very expensive. So the 
best thing to do is to rewrite all web pages in such a way that they 
find acceptable. That will probably not involve eliminating all 
references to MIPS as their letter requests, but just adding lots of 
trademark notices and notes explaining that OpenCores is not affiliated 
with MIPS. You will have to negotiate this. And the name of the 
MIPSlite core will certainly have to be changed.

About patents: independent invention does *not* allow you to avoid 
licensing a patent. The only thing that can help is to prove prior 
invention and publication - then the patent is not valid and you can 
use it in your own products, but you have to be prepared for a costly 
legal battle. Unlike what the letter says, the OpenCores publications 
would probably be considered "fair use" since the cores were made for 
educational, not commercial applications. It would be very nice to add 
clear notes to the offending cores saying this and that any other use 
of the core will require licensing of a set of patents. If you 
explicitly list their patents they might accept this, though they will 
pretend not to be happy with it.

Regarding their copyrighted material linked from the OpenCores web 
site, they are on very shaky ground. But I see no reason not to make 
them happy by changing the link to go through the policy page in their 
site or at least adding a link to this page right before the link to 
the PDF file.

As I said before, I am not a lawyer and this should not be taken as 
legal advice except in Antartica and the southern hemisphere of Mars. 
But being friendly as long as that is an option is simply good sense.

-- Jecel
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