[cookiecaper]

It's about the volatility and potential danger to copyright holders. If something requires a hardware hack, it's always going to take that much effort to apply. There's no easy way to instantaneously apply that hack to millions of peoples' hardware with minimal human effort.

With a software hack, it's much more fearful because once it gets packaged as a crack, it's four clicks to a perceived infringement on the copyright holder's rights. A barrier to entry this low makes software mods much more frightful to rightsholders.

Though the grandparent is right that these are similar practices in principle, people react differently because one is perceived as a widespread threat to the traditional mechanism of creative livelihood and the other is perceived as an advanced hack that will be done only be a couple of tinkerers. Most people are happy to provide encouragement and information to the latter group, but are more worried about the first group, as most software companies depend heavily on copyright law for their business model.