[emeritus]

Re#8, while most countries incorporated "Mask Protection" legislation into their respective copyright laws a couple of decades ago in order to benefit from the reciprocal protection provided by US law, it has proved to be pretty ineffective. AFAIR, copying was established in the first case in the US, but this was because when the layouts of the original and copy were superimposed, everything lined up, even the bonding pads. From the court's reasoning, it appeared that, had the copier used the same topology, but with the physical locations of the features moved around, then copying would not have been held to have occurred. Actually, the presence of sub-optimal features can be considered to demonstrate that copying has taken place, but it all depends on the facts. When I was with GEC I occasionally gave presentations to engineers about the law relating to copying, and, if it could be done without affecting performance, advised them to include circuitry or features that served no purpose, such as a gate that would never change state, or pairs of invertors in a signal path that were not there to provide a signal delay, and to document the fact.

I recall a case successfully brought by GI against Plessey, who had poached an engineer from GI and got him to design a telecommunications chip that was essentially identical to the GI design. It was a bit of a Phyrric victory, because their only customer was BT, BT always insisted on a second source for anything they bought, and because Plessey was the only other company capable of making it, GI had to allow them to manufacture under licence.

The law is always developing, and since retiring I'm afraid I have not kept up to date.