Quote from: CIYAM on March 06, 2015, 03:54:42 AM

Quote from: Soros Shorts on March 06, 2015, 02:26:10 AM

How would you apply this idea to something closer to home ... something like a Bitcoin mining ASIC? Say you are the owner of a fabless ASIC design firm and you've just spent the last 2 years designing the most efficient 16nm SHA256 mining chip. You send the digital design to a fab for manufacture. Should the fab be able to sell copies of your design to a third party? Or worse, manufacture extra chips using your masks and dump them on the market?

It's very simple - you make a legal agreement with the fab manufacture called a "non-disclosure period" (I am not against those). If they break the agreement then you take them to court (and if you don't trust Chinese courts then just stop using Chinese manufacturing).

Coming to China did lead me to have to challenge my thinking as making money from copies is the model that the company I used to work for employed (and that just doesn't work in China).

But I haven't starved or gone crawling back to "the man" just because people here won't pay for software copies.

What would stop one of your customers from copying your design? The process would not be as easy as in Soros Shorts's hypothetical example, however someone could reverse engineer a design and dump it on the market.

Patents are a very important piece of business as they give business the protection they need for their investment in research and development of new technology and products.