[TheLoneWolfling]

> 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).

[superuser2]

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.

[unprepare]

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...

[TheLoneWolfling]

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

[jahewson]

> 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.

[TheLoneWolfling]

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

[Kalium]

Why do you think Oracle has so many lawyers?