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by garmaine 2011 days ago
Public domain means no IP applies. Patents are only one kind of IP. There’s also copyrights, trademarks, etc.
1 comments

Sure, Intel didn't have any serious patents on the 8080 but they did copyright the assembly language mnemonics. So the Z80 was 100% compatible at the binary level but had to use other names for the instructions. Same thing with trademarks.

What I was saying is that what is described in the patent text can be freely used after the patent expires.