Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TheLoneWolfling 3929 days ago
> If you want to blow away the firmware...

False premise: you often cannot blow away the firmware, because it is either hard-coded, or signed.

And even when said premise is correct for a device, there are cases where the firmware inherently requires copyrighted material (For instance, requiring a (copyrighted) poem in a handshake).
2 comments
superuser2 3929 days ago
What the manufacturer makes it easy to do and what you can get in legal trouble for are different things.

Do you want the state to use men with guns to force everything with a microcontroller in it to also come with an SDK? I'm basically a socialist, and even I think that's ridiculous overreach.

link
unprepare 3929 days ago
Unlocking your phone in the US was actually illegal until August 1st of 2014.

You could be held for circumvention of copy protection schemes.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/unlocking-new-cel...

link
rayiner 3929 days ago
If you wiped the software rather than modifying it to unlock it, that probably wouldn't be illegal.
link
TheLoneWolfling 3929 days ago
> there are cases where the firmware inherently requires copyrighted material (For instance, requiring a (copyrighted) poem in a handshake).
link
jahewson 3929 days ago
> And even when said premise is correct for a device, there are cases where the firmware inherently requires copyrighted material (For instance, requiring a (copyrighted) poem in a handshake).

No way! Copyright law does not prevent someone from creating a new work that is designed to be compatible with an old work. Likely outcomes are that the poem would not qualify for copyright protection for that usage (it's not a poem as much as a sequence of arbitrary bytes to be read only by a computer), or that a fair use finding would be made, perhaps on the grounds that the copy does not affect the market for the original work - i.e. nobody was paying for the poem. Most likely a judge would just throw out the entire case at the start as a waste of the court's time.

link
TheLoneWolfling 3929 days ago
And when someone embeds an entire book (that was otherwise written and they have the rights for) into the handshake, what then?
link
Kalium 3929 days ago
Why do you think Oracle has so many lawyers?
link