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Comment by Ecco | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question: is it legal to share a die shot like this one? What does copyright law say about this?

I mean, yes, the author took the photo himself but what about the underlying material? Can I share a photo of an entire book? Do I own the copyright to a photo of a painting?

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In the US, semiconductor mask layouts are not eligible for copyright. Instead, the mask layout is protected under the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984. The Act grants rights similar to traditional copyright, but with a shorter period of protection and a more permissive framework for derivative works.

Notably, the "shorter period" is only 10 years.

Interesting, I imagine under normal copyright this would fall under fair use, does that exist for this as well?

I don't think it is any different than taking a photo of your car engine or gearbox or any such component.

Issues comes when you start to make copies.

Yep, this is my understanding.

Also, world practice shows that noone ever got into troubles for posting chip pictures, and in 10 years noone ever contacted me to remove any photos.

But companies do get intro troubles for trying to do copycat chip production, although it is not always easy to prosecute.

why not? you are free to disassemble your computer and take photo of motherboard or whatever hardware you have, I don't see how is taking photo of die different

you can have copyright to your own photo, but not to pictured design

Well a die design, just like code, is definitely some form of intellectual property and covered by copyright law. So I think a more fair comparison would be a photo of an entire book.

It might be a problem if the photo was reverse engineered into a schematic, which would also imply much more detail, but in this case it's just a photo of something cool.

> Well a die design, just like code, is definitely some form of intellectual property and covered by copyright law.

you can consume a book just by looking at it. You can't "read" a die-shot as easily.

The die design tells what parts are there, not their values or characteristics; cloning a chip just by looking at the die would require a lot more research.

> is definitely some form of intellectual property and covered by copyright law

I'm not sure if you meant to suggest that "some form of intellectual property" implies "covered by copyright law", but this is untrue in general, and untrue in this specific case.

Copyright does not cover mask works; see [1] for discussion, from which quote: "Copyright law ONLY protects an original work of authorship IF the work is non-functional. But the etching designs on computer chips ARE functional."

[1] https://revisionlegal.com/copyright/mask-works-101-copyright...

Chip dies are covered by a special mask copyright law - you can actually see the M with a circle round it in this die photo (rather than the more traditional C with a circle)

If the layout had copyright protection, this would still be fair use.

"Can I share a photo of an entire book?"

No is the short answer to that one.

Actually you can share a photo of an entire book - it's only that you can't share photos of all its individual pages as well...

(Sorry, tried hard to resist, and failed.)

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