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Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

The hardware is yours. If you want to blow away the firmware and write your own, no one can (legally) stop you on copyright grounds, though it might lose its street-legal status in the interest of the people you might manslaughter by writing buggy code.

It's where you want to modify the software and post a derivative work online that copyright law kicks in. You may as well say that you do not "own" a book, because you don't have the right to share an edited version of it. Sort of true, but not very interesting.

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Last time I checked, other than the Nexus phones, pretty much every manufacturer locks down their bootloaders, so no, you can't "blow away the firmware and write your own".

> 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).

> 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.

Why do you think Oracle has so many lawyers?

And when someone embeds an entire book (that was otherwise written and they have the rights for) into the handshake, what then?

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.

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...

If you wiped the software rather than modifying it to unlock it, that probably wouldn't be illegal.

> there are cases where the firmware inherently requires copyrighted material (For instance, requiring a (copyrighted) poem in a handshake).

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