Bret Ludwig is a confessed thief of copyright materials from me, from
the late Harvey Rosenberg and repeatedly from all the shareholders of
Apple Computer. He is scum. To draw a smokescreen over his thefts he
smears others with his own brush. The thief Ludwig is not a fit person
to lecture anyone on copyright; he lies about copyright law to suit
himself. -- Andre Jute


Bret Ludwig wrote:

Adam Stouffer wrote:
Iain Churches wrote:


I was interested to build your amplifier, and showed your
schematic to the head of technical service at Swedish TV.
He studied it carefully, for thirty seconds, screwed the paper
into a ball, tossed it into the waste bin.

How can you copyright a schematic thats straight from the National
datasheet?


Copyright in a schematic exists in the actual drawing, not in the
information it conveys. If I dismantle a (for example) de Paravicini or
Nestorovic product and make a drawing of its parts, whether schematic
or mechamical, the drawing is copyright at the time I draw it and is my
intellectual property, not theirs. This is even true if I take the
service schematic they may provide and redraw it thoroughly (meaning
that the drawing is not obviously derivative of theirs in terms of any
peculiar layout or symbol convention-i.e. Tim draws his transformer
symbols like one assumes Jayne Mansfield or Truman Capote would
have...).

An arrangement of components cannot be "copyrighted". It may be
protected by patent, or it may be a trade secret, which protects it
only against disclosure by employees or contractors of the builder and
not from reverse engineering or teardown-except in the specific case of
firmware.

There is no "moral copyright" except in the deranged mind of Andre
Jute, Mike Lefevre and a few other mountebanks, usually themselves
absconding with anything not securely bolted down.