Old & New

I guess I'll bring it up.

Other than the ethical issues, is there anything illegal about cloning a stock or aftermarket chip? Would this be viewed the same as copying commercial software in a court of law? Software is complex, unique code protected by copyright. Do these aftermarket companies copyright their firmware? How does someone copyright a group of settings in a NOVRAM?

If someone takes a stock chip, tweaks it & markets it, is this illegal? How would the original "owner" of the firmware prove that the parameter settings were not developed by the entrepreneur? If there is legal infringement, would it be against Porsche, Bosch, or the aftermarket company?

If there are no legal hurdles, why not get together & clone us some chips?

<img border="0" alt="[cheers]" title="" src="graemlins/beerchug.gif" />

BrianG

Copyright laws seem to be a very complex issue. This whole concept of the protection of intellectual property is relatively new and therefore pretty vague. With the newness comes a paucity of case-law also, so it seems that this creats a realm where each new case is precident setting. My read on that is that all this translates into one word....... EXPENSIVE. I guess the question is; "Do you wanna play?"

Herr Schnell

You would need a lot more information to make the determination as to whether it is legal, but in addition to the possibility of copyright law protection (chip drawings and perhaps circuit layouts) it could also be patented. And I think there is also a federal "mask(ed) works" law that protects chip designs specifically.

Old & New

Brian,

I guess the aftermarketers have already approached those issues... but has any of them paid licensing fees to Bosch or Porsche??? If they have not, then that kind of resolves this issue.

Dan,

It's not the electronics at issue; these chips are readily available & ready to program. At issue is the settings which anyone (who knows how) can program in.

I would liken this situation to me telling you that you couldn't program your VCR the same way as mine. These are user settings in both cases.

Big Dave? Any words of wisdom?

Big Dave

Copyright protection arises as a matter of law at the moment an intellectual work is created in fixed form, whether or not that work is registered with U.S. Copyright Office. Registration grants additional protection and statutory damages for infringement.

The act of a singer performing a song at a concert does not give rise to copyright protection, but the act of recording that performance onto a tape or CD does.

Embedded software onto a computer chip seems to me to qualify as putting an intellectual work onto a fixed form. The software was likely protected already when it was saved to the programmer's computer drive.

So, to answer the question, I'd argue that performance chips are protected by copyright law the same as a computer game on CD-ROM is protected. I won't get into whether the chip is protected by patent. That should be evident just by looking at the chip for the proper notice.

Reading the software embedded on the chips and improving it (I'm getting beyond my expertise) might not be a literal infringement, but the answer would depend at least in part on how much the coding has been modified. The less modification, the more it looks like an infringement to me.

There are certain "fair use" exceptions to copyright, but I don't see how they would apply to this situation.

BrianG

Another thing that I overheard once was the issue of "reproduction for personal purposes" and that somehow it was OK to copy your CD for yourself but not for resale. I suppose that if that is true, one could copy their "chip" for their "other" 928; but could you then "give" the copy to someone else?

Perhaps the best approach is to get the group together over some "beer and bugs" and create our own "Rennlist fuel/spark map" for burning PROMS for our own purposes. Might be fun, and might not grenade our cars! <img border="0" alt="[cheers]" title="" src="graemlins/beerchug.gif" /> (or it might)

Old & New

Interesting stuff, Dave. I knew you'd come through. (insert big hug Graemlin here)

Let me clarify something, and give it a little thought...

When you program a NOVRAM, it is not writing code or reverse engineering a product, but just changing user values exactly like changing the BIOS values in your computer. The Bosch computer reads these calibration values as how to behave given various other factors, just as in your PC. For example, a value might specify how the computer is to read a hard drive, or how rich to make a fuel mixture based on the temperature of the coolant, etc.

Certainly no entity can stop me from changing my own values in my own PC or car, when I want to. Now if you called me & I shared that info with you, there is certainly no liability in that. Now if you decided to change your values & even asked someone to do it for you... If there is no money changing hands, there *certainly* shouldn't be an issue, right?

The next step, of course, is whether is is legal for me to solicit payment to change some values in a chip which you own. If you sent me your chip & I were to program it with a set of values that you provided, is there any illegal activity there? Of course not. It is a commonly available service.

So put it all together... I'm a guy who can write a NOVRAM for the cost of shipping, etc. You send me a 27C256 -120 EPROM (erasable programable read only memory - kind of an oxymoron ). You tell me to burn it with a set of values which you found in some forum.

Everything's cool, right??? (Please say yes, oh please say yes...) I'd like nothing better than to knock this rip-off aftermarket chip business on it's a$$ (at least as far as 928's go).

BrianG

Frankly, I'm surprized that DEVEK hasn't done something like this in concert with their engine development program. After all, how unlike changing carb jets & metering rods and distributor weights & springs is this anyway? "Back in the day" no racer worth his salt ran the stock fuel and spark "maps". Why would they today? Mark???????????

Big Dave

Old & New:

I have a lot to learn about how these chips operate. I was assuming (still am) that there's some type of software "program" embedded on the chip that was written by someone. If what's on there is more like a recipe for the engine (i.e., bake the cake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes) and the performance chips change the recipe (400 degress for 15 minutes), its much harder for me to figure out how reproducing that onto another chip is infringement. Basically you'd be finding out what values the chip is feeding your car's computer and making another chip feed values that accomplish the same result. This sounds a little like reverse engineering which, if done appropriately, is not infringement.

Again, I'm getting waaayy past my knowledge base here, so if anyone has better info, please jump right in.

It's Friday after 5pm....I shouldn't be thinking so much!

Old & New

Besides, has anyone but me seen the link to that company who will create a custom performance chip for an individual car? (I'm not sure if I should trust my memory of what I read after that last discussion with Ed). I believe they use a piggyback or replacement computer, starting with stock values. They tweak them for your car & burn you a chip.

Herr Schnell

Brian,

I'm pretty sure the "personal reproduction" is limited to music in the Copyright Act. I'm almost certain that doctrine wouldn't apply to chips.

Old & New,

Part of the analysis depends on whether any type of copy protection exists on the chip. If so, it raises other issues under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as to whether it can be cracked and for what purposes. If the chip just acts as a unprotected database (like a phone book or recipe)then I think Dave is right -- it would be hard to see how copying and changing those values is an infringement.

There is some kind of mask work act that protects chips in other ways. But I don't have clients that do chip work so I have no idea how it would apply here. And the chips don't have to have a patent notice on them (although they likely would).

FWIW, other companies are clearly selling reprogrammed chips and computers to reprogram them. I doubt most of them have licenses to do so from the manufacturer.

KBlair

<a href="http://www.bgsoflex.com/megasquirt.html" target="_blank">MegaSquirt DIY computer</a>

Big Dave,

Look at the above link. It should provide a good grounding in the basics of what the chips are doing. I'd like to try the MegaSquirt in my shark, but I'd have to call it something else

Old & New

Dan,

No, I do not believe that any copy protection exists. That's why that company doesn't mind cloning the defective chip in the thread that got me started on this topic:

EPROMs for 87-91 928S4's?

As per my previous post, here is an example of a company that burns custom chips:

<a href="http://www.ecmking.com/EPROMBurning.htm" target="_blank">Texas company</a>

I just think the aftermarket guys prosper because of Joe Blow's ignorance of the ability to clone & modify his chip. I will begin to look into the hardware requirements for this chip. Maybe Dan87951 will be magnanimous and let me "examine" his broken chip after he has a clone made. Performance chips all around! (pending legal approval, of course)

And there is already some interest out there:

<a href="http://pweb.de.uu.net/pr-meyer.h/prom.htm" target="_blank">Tuning the 1227730 ECM EPROM Chip</a>

These chips are available for $4 each, to boot.

TJQuill

While I am an attorney (and I don't admit that very often), this is definitely not my area of expertise, so what follows is more opinion than fact:

The short answer is that, IMO, it would be a copyright violation to clone the chip unless you were doing it solely to create a backup chip for use if the original failed. The longwinded discussion follows:

First, my understanding of what is on the chip: Using the recipe example, I would say that the chip has less information on it and is therefore even less analogous to computer software than was described in the previous posts. All of the instructions (the software) for baking the cake are somewhere else, and those instructions might say: "Place cake in oven at *A* degrees for *B* minutes." The rest of the system knows to go and get the values for A and B from the table encoded on the chip. All that is on the chip is this table from which settings are retrieved, not the instructions for the rest of the fuel management system.

A work's facts are not protected by copyright, even if the author spent large amounts of time, effort, and money discovering those facts. Copyright protects originality, not effort and facts by definition cannot be original.

This table is a compilation of facts. Facts themselves cannot be copyrighted, but the expression of the facts can be. A compilation of facts (a work formed by collecting and assembling data) is protected by copyright only to the extent of the author's originality in the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the facts.

IMO, the selection and arrangement of the "facts" (in this case the values in the table) are precisely what is being proposed for copying, and I think that the table would therefore be subject to copyright.

That's how I see it and why I wouldn't advise that you set up shop and advertise cloned performance chips. The downside is that if they have registered their copyright (extremely unlikely), they can seek damages as high as $30,000 per copied work and $150,000 if the infringement was willful.

As a practical matter, I would imagine that the chances that such a copyright would be enforced if a group got together and figured out how to do it in a non-commercial way is about as likely as a college kid being sued by Warner Bros. for having an MP3 copy of a song that he downloaded from the internet on his computer. But that is outside the legal and into the ethical realm and I don't want to mix the two in one post.

Old & New

O.K. T.J. & thank you for your input. May I play devil's advocate for a moment?

Assuming I started with "industry standard" values in the table, and tweaked them to perfection, there would be no problem then?

Assuming the typical 928 requires a given set of values to run at best performance, might I not end up with a set of values that would be very close to the original Porsche and typical aftermarket values? Some, if not many, values might even duplicate due to the digital nature of the input set.

I share this information with everyone (the table would develop as an "open source" project) & program anyone's chip at their request (to their specifications) for a huge profit, of say $20 each.

What legal pitfalls might I encounter?

P.S. Ethically, I would not feel too bad about sticking it to the companies which charge $600 to program a $4 chip.