| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Freeing the firmwareFreeing the firmwarePosted Nov 6, 2004 2:01 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: Freeing the firmware by ncm 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 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.
(Log in to post comments)
|
|
||||||||||||