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Comment by bigyikes | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: aren’t schematics trade secrets? Won’t public schematics make it easier for others to copy? That seems like a big deal to me. If I were designing a new piece of technology, I wouldn’t necessarily want to publish my schematics.

I ask this as somebody who would love to have the schematics of all my devices. I would love to know why this actually isn’t a big deal.

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1. There's nothing particularly innovative about the electronic design in most of these devices. It's just gluing chips together.

2. Screw trade secrets anyway. They should get zero consideration in any matter of law or public policy.

Schematics used to be included in user manuals for all consumer electronics.

Anyone capable of recreating an electronic device from schematics can easily reverse engineer such device from the board. They are not secret. Reverse engineering them is a little time consuming, but it's not hard. Circuit board design follows established conventions. I can fix boards without schematics.

For most electronics, no. Certainly not the schematics needed to repair them.

Especially when there’s possibly thousands or more ‘official’ repair people, whatever information they have is not a trade secret.

Furthermore, any other company could pretty easily reverse engineer or at least approximate the schematics (the kind we’re talking about here) making it not a trade secret.

Sorta, but unless you want source for the chip, there likely isn't anything that interesting you can learn from looking at traces, even with pins labeled. Competitors probably already do this for every new, interesting device. The biggest risk is probably device security, but you can't really depend on pinouts being secret for that.

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