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Comment by teacup50 | Hacker News Reader

This is something Apple does in their 'DSMOS' (don't steal Mac OS X) code (but they use copyright, not a trademark).

Mac OS X looks for a set of firmware variables containing a non-formatted version of following haiku (reproduced for the purpose of artistic comment):

    our hard work 
    by these words guarded
    please dont steal
    © Apple Computer Inc

If you shipped a transparently Mac-compatible x86 machine, you'd have to include this haiku (in some form) in the firmware.

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Sega tried this to prevent third party games from running. It didn't work: because their string was required for functionality, it wasn't protected by copyright. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade for details.

If GNU is copyleft, is this then copy far right?

Cute. I remember some anti-spam outfit trying to "protect" emails with a copyrighted poem in the headers: http://www.oblomovka.com/writing/habeas%3A_the_antispam_haik...

I wonder how far back in OS(X) it dates?

It was introduced as part of the Intel transition, prior to public release.

Internally, Mac OS X ran on commodity PCs for quite some time before that and didn't include DSMOS.

Serious question: if I made a computer with the purpose of booting Mac OS X, noticed that it aborted after trying to read some bytes from the firmware, then wrote a program to iteratively test longer and longer sequences, would I be committing copyright infringement? What if I never look at the output of the program as text, but only as hex values?

IANAL, but speaking generally, the courts seem to take a dim view at technical workarounds, and instead focus on the actual intention and result.

In this particular case, I believe what you would have produced would be classified as a "circumvention" device under the DMCA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention).

The state of "IP" law makes me very sad.

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