can they do this ?

[Chrabban]

i just found this on e-bay, they cant just take a pic of some ones work can they ?
LM3886 X2 Parallel Mono amplifier board | eBay

(real one)

PA100 DIY 2x LM3886 in parallel gainclone audio amplifier

[Bone]

The Chinese have no concept of copyright. They'll copy anything!

[AndrewT]

I asked seller three "probing" questions.
Let's see them reply or not.

[pacificblue]

The zoe_tsang PCB seems sufficiently different from the shine7 PCB that it cannot simply be called Copy-&-Paste. And the pin layout does not allow that many extremely different PCB layouts.

And, yes, they can do this, if whoever of them made the first design did not invest money in copyright protection. It is also highly questionable if a PCB layout for a datasheet application of a chipamp is worthy of copyright protection at all.

[AndrewT]

He only chose to answer the last, "no schematic, so sorry"

I will report this seller to Ebay.

[DF96]

Under UK (and European?) law copyright automatically exists and belongs to the creator of a work, so any unauthorised copying is an offence. Not the same everywhere else in the world. Some have different copyright law, others just ignore whatever law they (in theory) have. People who happily buy 'Chinese copies' encourage this.

[godfrey]

The PCBs look totally different. The only problem I see is that the bottom photo on the advert is copied from the shine7 website.

[5th element]

Originally Posted by godfrey

The only problem I see is that the bottom photo on the advert is copied from the shine7 website.

That is the problem. Using someone elses work for the promotion and sale of their product.

[pacificblue]

Originally Posted by DF96

Under UK (and European?) law copyright automatically exists and belongs to the creator of a work,

If the work is worthy of protection. So the question remains, is making a PCB for a schematic that is basically copied from a datsheet worthy of any copyright protection?

[DF96]

Given that you can produce many different but equivalent PCB layouts, any one of them could be regarded as a substantial work and so protected by copyright. Copyright in the circuit may rest with the chip maker, and they probably assume that their customers will more or less copy their circuits. I think (I may be wrong) that copyright cannot be used to protect something which can only be expressed in one way, so there is no creativity in it. The creativity does not have to be very profound, merely present in some form.

I suppose one way to look at it is: if copying it would save me work, then it must involve creativity to produce it, and therefore I am infringing copyright if I copy it without permission. If it is worth copying, then it is protected!