| General > General Technical Chat |
| Why do companies try to take patents out on standard schematics? |
| << < (6/16) > >> |
| Zero999:
--- Quote from: thm_w on October 26, 2021, 10:09:33 pm --- --- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on October 26, 2021, 01:03:26 pm ---Oh you mean as an employee? Ahh, so this is just another in a carnival of terrible companies you've worked at? Par for the course I suppose. --- End quote --- What are the chances that every single company is that bad though, at some point you have to start reflecting on yourself. OP seems to work at companies for at most a few months (contractor?). If I knew he's going to be gone in a month I wouldn't want to bother setting up an account to access whatever protected folder or site contains the product schematic, unless they had some specific need to look at them. Not to mention accounts sometimes cost a lot of money to add, if this is an online database. --- Quote from: Benta on October 26, 2021, 09:42:33 pm ---I've never experienced this, but your employer might have identified you as a special case/danger as it would appear from this thread: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/electronics-companies-putting-viruss-onto-usb-sticks/ --- End quote --- IT probably controls access then and has him on a watch list. Too much risk in ransomeware taking over important folders at that point. --- End quote --- If he's a contractor, then surely it would be easier to simply not renew his contract, when it ends? If I had reason to suspect a colleague was up to no good, I'd report him/her to the IT/security manager and hope they investigate. If it turns out they're planning to put malware on the company network, they'd be fired very quickly. |
| SiliconWizard:
It all comes down to a given company's policy. I've seen both approaches and almost anything in between. Just realize that engineers "seeing" schematics is not the main issue there for companies having this kind of "restricted access" policy. The more major confidentiality issue is giving *access* to confidential files in general - because those files can then easily be copied and get out of the company where they should often not belong. And the more employees you give access to files, the higher the probability of file "leaks" - intentional or not! |
| thm_w:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on October 27, 2021, 02:08:55 pm ---If he's a contractor, then surely it would be easier to simply not renew his contract, when it ends? If I had reason to suspect a colleague was up to no *good, I'd report him/her to the IT/security manager and hope they investigate. If it turns out they're planning to put malware on the company network, they'd be fired very quickly. --- End quote --- Yeah, which is probably what is happening. That or if UK has a probationary period. I'm not suggesting OP is up to no good intentionally at all, but has some personality problem. Could be along the lines of "everyone is out to get me", and "I know what is best" which is just going to create endless conflict. |
| basinstreetdesign:
--- Quote from: ferdieCX on October 26, 2021, 02:57:38 pm --- --- Quote from: Kjelt on October 26, 2021, 01:45:05 pm --- Go back in time to the 80's / 90's, Philips, a dutch consumer electronics and TME manufacturer, for any of their devices they had service manuals you could order and buy for $15-30. In the end of the service manual there was the schematic, the pcb layout with quadrants and all the parts that you also could order. They did this for the repair dept. but also external companies that could repair their products. Go forward to 2021, Apple won't give any details, schematics, nor sell you any spare chip, etc. They call that progress :palm: --- End quote --- I remember a time when Philips used to put inside a copy of the schematics, even in a portable transistor radio. --- End quote --- Yes, the Sony TC-560 tape recorder I bought with my student loan in 1971 came with a full schematic. I used it to hack in a manual direction reverse switch. In the industry I worked in, broadcast video, full schematics and BOM in the service manual was SOP. |
| vk6zgo:
--- Quote from: basinstreetdesign on October 28, 2021, 01:11:12 am --- --- Quote from: ferdieCX on October 26, 2021, 02:57:38 pm --- --- Quote from: Kjelt on October 26, 2021, 01:45:05 pm --- Go back in time to the 80's / 90's, Philips, a dutch consumer electronics and TME manufacturer, for any of their devices they had service manuals you could order and buy for $15-30. In the end of the service manual there was the schematic, the pcb layout with quadrants and all the parts that you also could order. They did this for the repair dept. but also external companies that could repair their products. Go forward to 2021, Apple won't give any details, schematics, nor sell you any spare chip, etc. They call that progress :palm: --- End quote --- I remember a time when Philips used to put inside a copy of the schematics, even in a portable transistor radio. --- End quote --- Yes, the Sony TC-560 tape recorder I bought with my student loan in 1971 came with a full schematic. I used it to hack in a manual direction reverse switch. In the industry I worked in, broadcast video, full schematics and BOM in the service manual was SOP. --- End quote --- Yep, same in the TV studio & TV/Radio transmitter sites I worked at. Being on the other side of the world to your supplier made it necessary to know everything you could about the product, so you could fix design stuff ups (and, to be fair, sometimes just unavoidable faults) in equipment, using those components common in Oz. With a later employer, a customer's piece of hearing test equipment had a failure in the CRT type display(no tech info, of course). The usual fix was to get a refurbed swap unit from the USA at $A1200, but the maker had decided to discontinue that service, so you had to buy a much more expensive, new monitor section. Of course, they had sanded the part number off the Scan IC, but a lot of the components around it looked familiar. I "reached out" to an old colleague, who loaned me an Electrohome BW monitor workshop manual. The schematic was exactly the same, down to component values, so I nominated the "usual suspect"---an apparently under specified diode. Sure enough, it was faulty, replaced it with a 10c diode from the parts store, & all was well! |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |