General > General Technical Chat
Why do companies try to take patents out on standard schematics?
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coppercone2:
Another set of eyes can find a bug and that helps if its concrete like a component rating, impedance problem, etc. Easy to get a reliability increase or performance increase if you find some obvious easy to rectify flaw.

but often there are so many minor compromises made and so many limitations put on a design by cost/logistics/culture problems/considerations that explaining what it is might require quite a bit of history, politics, etc.

and offices are often understaffed or under high load so someone just knows its not whats going to get them ahead with bosses or evolve in the company. The person you are talking to about a design might have had to do the office equivalent of breaking through a brick wall with their bare hands to get whatever it is.
bson:
Maybe it's due to an overzealous legal department that thinks their IP rights are forfeited if they don't restrict access to need-to-know.
floobydust:
It's a big problem for regulatory like UL/CSA/Intertek etc. where certifiers see and review schematics everyday. Because of the IP you are looking at, the employment contract forbids you from building, well anything. You cannot build anything on the side. For this reason, no hobbyist or enthusiast would work in that kind of job, that completely owns your brain.
The fear is you'll take the IP, the way some company did it, and go off and make your own product or aid a company towards doing that.

I know I can glance at a schematic and see the IP if there's something unique in the design that distinguishes it.

Once I toured a PC assembly house, and they had certain customers that forbid outsiders from looking at the stuffed circuit boards.
VK3DRB:
IBM made a monumental miscalculation by publishing the entire schematic, the BIOS listing and other technical documentation to the personal computer, thinking manufacturers would use this to make peripheral cards to support the PC. Instead, a number of companies used this information to make PC clones.

The rest, as they say, is history.
Zero999:

--- Quote from: VK3DRB on November 13, 2021, 06:39:48 am ---IBM made a monumental miscalculation by publishing the entire schematic, the BIOS listing and other technical documentation to the personal computer, thinking manufacturers would use this to make peripheral cards to support the PC. Instead, a number of companies used this information to make PC clones.

The rest, as they say, is history.

--- End quote ---
Maybe, but would everyone have a PC now, if they hadn't done that?

IBM clones only took off because they were cheap. At the time and for a good 10 or so years, they were well behind most other platforms and were generally poor value for money.
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