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tinus_hn | 2 years ago

They include a library from MacOS that makes it register:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38534247

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modeless|2 years ago

That's why there's are exemptions to copyright for interoperability reasons. You can't hide behind copyrights (or trademarks) solely to exclude competitors. (I believe Beeper uses this library solely for registration, not normal operation.) Such tactics have lost in court multiple times.

tinus_hn|2 years ago

That’s a totally different kind of case where the barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce copyrighted content, like in the case of the DSMOS chip which contains a poem which has to be provided for the OS to work. These tactics have sometimes been successful and sometimes been unsuccessful. It’s just the legal lottery.

Here they simply provide someone else’s library to perform the authentication. That’s just basic copyright infringement, however lofty the goal.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/858511/what-is-com-apple...

https://www.theregister.com/2003/08/11/habeas_cans_spammer/

You can’t write an emulator and sell it including the bios written by Sony. Has been enforced many times. Similarly, you can’t do what Beeper is doing here.