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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

It’s several steps up from Chinese manufacturers already however where they will almost certainly use your design for something else if it suits them and you have no protections.

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I agree up to a point. It's like the difference in giving someone binary or source code. Yes, someone can reverse engineer gerbers into a schematic, but that's a lot different than handing over the schematic, which includes more information about the design than the gerbers do. It's much easier to look at a schematic and say "oh, that's a circuit I want to use" than it is to look at gerber files and think that.

I have some level of confidence that JLC is going to protect my IP. They are big and if someone's IP leaked it could be devastating to their business. Their legal agreements are a lot more detailed and favorable than what's currently on circuithub.

Pretty much any new product gets a Chinese copy within a year. How are you so confident JLC is not the source of atleast some of these. Also there is no other alternative so they have that security.

Chinese engineering labor is dirt cheap. They don't need your design files to make a clone.

And contrary to popular white-washed belief, there is very little to anything special in most copied designs.

That's fair. But gerber files are just a step up from reverse engineering a physical PCB. For a fairly simple, 2 layer PCB, the actual hardware will be easier to reverse engineer than gerbers alone.

So even if nobody ever sees my schematic or gerber files, they could still clone a lot of products if they just have someone spend some time with a multimeter on a device they buy.

Yeah, or at this point just get an LLM to verify it and explain the circuit.

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