I believe that what Prof Kamau has done is the dissasembly, cataloguing and indexing of the *components* of the STB, including how they are interconnected, the circuit board designs, internal and external interfaces etc... This then serves as the basis to be able to procure same or similar - adapt the designs in order to come up with a local version, ostensibly at a lower cost. Patents in such hardware are held by the chip manufacturers - Prof would be offending if what he was doing was trying to 'hack' the chip in order to produce his own version. That would be a grossly expensive and in all likelihood, foolhardy pursuit. It's much easier (and cheaper), once the components have been identified to purchase them from the same manufacturer and simply do the assembly here - with whatever local modifications may be required. I remember that when we started messing around with computer assembly in the early 90s - the furore from the "branded" companies - with all kinds of threats regarding patents, copyrights etc... I simply see this as determination of components for local assembly of STBs. I'm sure the good professor is wise, intelligent and educated enough to know that patent infringement could land himself in a heap of trouble. Regards, Brian On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 9:07 AM, Walubengo J <[email protected]> wrote:
@Andrea,
Reverse engineering - or patent infringement?
If I was Prof. Kamau, I would carefully ride on both - depending on the convenience of the laws applicable and the demand for public good. Draw the parallel with generic HIV medicines...
walu.
--- On *Tue, 2/9/10, Andrea Bohnstedt <[email protected]
* wrote:
From: Andrea Bohnstedt <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [kictanet] Getting a hold on cybercrime against women (cyber pests!) To: [email protected] Cc: "KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions" <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, February 9, 2010, 12:40 AM
Reverse engineering - or patent infringement?
On 8 February 2010 21:01, <[email protected]<http://mc/[email protected]>
wrote:
Dear listers, Prof. Kamau, University of Nairobi's engineering school has successifully reverse engineered the converter box for digital TV. Those willing to visit the fab lab next week should register with Awiti in my office. His e-mail is [email protected]<http://mc/[email protected]> .
I am hoping soon we can reverse engineer the ipad so that we can use it to distribute e-books to all kids in the country and avoid this theft of textbooks.
Regards.
Ndemo. Sent from my BlackBerry®
-----Original Message----- From: "muriuki mureithi" <[email protected]<http://mc/[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 18:14:20 To: <[email protected] <http://mc/[email protected]>> Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions<[email protected]<http://mc/[email protected]>
Subject: [kictanet] Getting a hold on cybercrime against women (cyber pests!)
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