First of all, this kind of behavior is not clearly defined in law. On the other hand, the sale for profit after imitation should be regarded as infringement, and the specific judgment depends on the specific behavior.
1, copying the circuit board is not infringing. Printed circuit boards have no corresponding intellectual property rights.
2. Copyright, layout design and appearance design of integrated circuits cannot be used to protect circuit boards. This is a defect in the design of the legal system, which cannot be overcome and protected at present.
3.pcb reproduction belongs to the category of reverse engineering. Since the birth of the whole concept, it has been widely controversial. The method of reverse engineering plays a great role in the development of integrated circuit industry. All manufacturers in the world use this method to understand the development of other people's products. If this behavior is strictly prohibited, it will affect the progress of integrated circuit technology. Therefore, all countries regard this as an exception to infringement under certain conditions when legislating. For the purpose of teaching, analyzing and evaluating the concept and technology in layout design or the circuit, logical structure and component configuration used in layout design, copying layout design, and applying the analysis and evaluation results to the original layout design on this basis, and manufacturing integrated circuits accordingly, it is not regarded as infringement. However, for the purpose of commercial sales only, copying other people's protected layout-designs to produce integrated circuits shall be deemed as infringement.
Second, the law stipulates that
China's "Regulations" have special provisions on the originality of integrated circuit layout design, and the protected layout design should be original, that is, the layout design is the result of the creator's own intellectual labor, and it is not recognized as a conventional design among layout design creators and integrated circuit manufacturers at the time of its creation. Therefore, the originality requirements of integrated circuit layout design include two aspects: first, the layout design should be created by the designer himself; The other is that layout should be unconventional in this field. The judgment of unconventional design is an empirical problem at the technical level, and it is generally difficult to list detailed judgment principles and methods. But what is certain is that this unconventional requirement, that is, the requirement of creativity, does not pursue the obvious invention span in the patent law, but only requires a certain progressive difference compared with the conventional design. Therefore, we can deal with the problems in examination and judicial trial by mastering the method of judging whether the layout design of integrated circuits is independent and creative.
With regard to the judgment of independent creation, most commentators advocate adopting the judgment methods of "connection" and "substantial similarity" in copyright law. That is to say, the premise of judging the layout design of integrated circuit as independent creation must be that the plaintiff has provided evidence of contact, or at least proved the possibility of contact. Only after the connection is determined should substantive similarity judgment be made. The judgment of creativity is mainly based on two factors. One is to judge the expression of integrated circuit layout design idea, and the other is to judge whether integrated circuit layout design has industrial application.