For now, the License Zone consists of articles about
licenses for free hardware designs. The old mailing list is closed down due to lack of interest and spam, but the archives are still available.
Open Source Hardware Licenses: a summary
of some of the issues.
Closed for repairs
The Creation of Interoperable Integrated Circuits Using Clean Room Design Practice. Don't be fooled by the dry title: this (long) document by the creators of the Wishbone architecture has a wealth of information on all related legal issues, particularly on how to create a clean separation between copyright and patent governed aspects of a design.
Semiconductor layouts (the law protecting
chip layouts or masks in not identical to copyright law).
copyright and pcb layout - a short discussion among lawyers. (conclusion, for US law: Although the circuit boards' plans are probably protected by copyright, the copyright is weak,
because the boards are useful articles under section 101, and copyright
does not protect industrial design.
Related Sites
FFII document
current data for projects, which is archived with a timestamp. This may be used
to prove prior art in case of patent claims against free projects (based on
European law).