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Originally Posted by chb
It's probably not that clear; AFAIK at least here in Germany an electronic circuit layout is not protected by copyright law. There are possibilities to protect a design (patents, utility patents), but they need to be filed for, cost money, and are more narrow.
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Patents are very different from copyright, which is what we're talking about here. Ideas are patented, designs are copyrighted. And while a circuit in itself might not be protected, I find it very hard to believe that there's a legal loophole that allows 1:1 cloning of entire circuit boards. It's certainly not legal to copy a design in that way in the UK or Ireland, even without registering the design with the IPO, and I was pretty sure that was a harmonised directive across the EU ("Unregistered Design Rights" here, probably a different name in Germany).
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So yes, if you do a 1:1 copy, it may be legal if the owner of the original design did not protect it. Usually very bad style nonetheless, and probably totally wrong from a moral standpoint in this case.
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Again, I find that a very strange state of affairs, since at a basic level, design rights are automatically applied when you create a design.
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I am not familiar with this clone, so I do not know if that's the case here. They might also have violated other laws (trademarks, copyright for e.g. some graphical logos on the board).
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This clone appears to be a 100% copy of the board. Not a re-engineered workalike as is the case with the poor IBM example above (which, incidentally, even shows some improvements over the IBM original). Nobody designed the clone from scratch using the same parts - it's an exact copy of the PCB.