| |||||||||||
Freeing the firmwareFreeing the firmwarePosted Nov 4, 2004 4:06 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)Parent article: Freeing the firmware I question whether these firmware images are covered by copyright at all, when used purely to enable legally-obtained devices to operate as advertised. The judges' comments in the Lexmark case seemed to indicate not. The "cookie" remark is apropos: the firmware image is just an unusually long access key, a big number. Numbers qua numbers aren't copyrightable. You need some kind of expressive quality to get copyright protection.
(Log in to post comments)
Freeing the firmware Posted Nov 4, 2004 4:56 UTC (Thu) by obobo (guest, #684) [Link] The firmware for the Broadcom 2033 bluetooth chip is 112k; it is a substantial chunk of code running on a decently powerful microcontroller. It is a lot bigger than the Apple ][ firmware/OS that was granted copyright protection.
Freeing the firmware Posted Nov 4, 2004 20:42 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] The issue is, granted to whom? Franklin couldn't distribute copies of Apple's ROMs because that was for commercial gain, in competition with Apple. Firmware to drive the originator's own hardware, distributed free, ought to be a different matter. In copyright cases, details matter. It would be very helpful to identify a case that closely matches, in which the image was denied copyright protection.
Freeing the firmware Posted Nov 6, 2004 2:01 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I question whether these firmware images are covered by copyright at all, when used purely to enable legally-obtained devices to operate as advertised. The judges' comments in the Lexmark case seemed to indicate not. The judge's comments didn't say Lexmark software wasn't covered by copyright. He said 1) nobody copied it; and 2) DMCA restrictions on circumventing copy-protection devices (which apply even in the absence of actual copying) didn't apply. I think the only lesson we can adopt from that is that one could reverse engineer the video card and write his own firmware from scratch without breaking any laws. Numbers qua numbers aren't copyrightable. You need some kind of expressive quality to get copyright protection I see a whole lot of expressive quality here. This isn't an arbitrary string of bits. They're carefully arranged, at considerable intellectual expense to the author. They express the solution to a complex computational problem. It's exactly what copyright is designed to protect.
|
|||||||||||