[Cryptography] Intel's $10-100 billion Minix copyright problem

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Sun Dec 10 14:17:05 EST 2017


FYI --

[1] https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/penalties.html

"The law provides a range from $200 to $150,000 for each work infringed.

Infringer pays for all attorneys fees and court costs."

[2] http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/12/02/supplying-legal-notices-free-software/

Supplying Legal Notices for Free Software in your Products

By Fredrik Ohrstrom December 2, 2017

"Minix 3 is licensed under a BSD-style license and condition 2
states that if you want to distribute binary forms of Minix 3, you
have to give legal notice:"

"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

"Normally, there is a very small risk of being sued for accidentally
missing a legal notice, since the authors of Free Software have better
things to do.  In this case however, Intel has, perhaps with intent,
contradicted the license for a purpose that Free Software authors
dislike.  Also, the amount of damages that can be argued for, is
remarkable.  Think about it; the software is probably in almost every
x86 Skylake CPU sold in the world for the last couple of years.
Perhaps this will be the first case where a BSD style license is
tested in court."

[3] http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4461&context=wlulr

The FISA Court and Article III
Stephen I. Vladeck
6-1-2015

-----
Ordinarily, I'm not fond of IP lawyers, but this time I'm
cheering heartily from the sidelines.  For a company like
Intel to install secret backdoors into every chip they sell
is completely unforgivable, and perhaps a bankruptcy-inducing
judgement will inspire every other vendor to become more
transparent.

If Intel sold 100,000 chips with embedded Minix, then it
might be liable for up to $150k *per chip*, or $15 billion. 
If Intel sold 1 million chips with Minix, Intel might be
liable for $150 billion, and so on.

I'm now expecting to hear that Intel was *forced* by the
FISA "court" (perhaps not even an actual Article 3 court
[3]) to incorporate the ME "spy engine" into every chip,
and that same "court" issued an NSL to keep the existence
of this "spy engine" secret.



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