1. While facts are not copyrightable as far as I know (IANAL), still isn't there a "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine? One shouldn't profit from illegal activity. If someone violated BestBuy's copyright, e.g., by photocopying a flyer before release, then there would be a legal (and certainly moral!) problem with FatWallet profiting from the information derived from the illegally made copy.
2. Normally/. is all for privacy. But isn't this really a privacy issue? Someone has taken BestBuy's private information and published it. That BestBuy is a corporation doesn't mean that their privacy doesn't matter: after all, a corporation is just constituted by a bunch of individuals (shareholders or owners and their employees). I am myself rather minimalistic on alleged rights to privacy, but anybody who thinks I have a right not to have the contents of my private documents published on the web by hackers should surely accord that right to BestBuy.
1. Does that mean that if you are running an ftp server on your system, you can't have the files ANYWHERE on your system, no matter what the permissions of the files are? Or does it only apply to anonymous ftp accounts? What if you have a user named "anonymous" on your system who has a very insecure password?
2. Does every folder on an insecure OS count as "shared"?
There could still be ethical concerns. Ethics can require things the law does not (and vice versa). If you hack the camera, you're getting more than you paid for, more than the seller intended to give you, for less than it cost him to provide it.
It is logically coherent to think this is wrong even if legal. For instance, medieval philosophers like Thomas Aquinas had a "fair price" doctrine on which it is unethical to charge more for something than it is honestly worth. Moreover, it did not matter for the doctrine whether the buyer knew this. (Think of a case where a starving person is sold a loaf of bread, from the only food producer in town, for $100. He knows he's being cheated, but he's still being cheated.) There is something inherently plausible to the fair price doctrine, though it is not something that we would really want to enshrine in law except maybe in extreme cases (not everything unethical should be illegal!), e.g., because the law is just too crude an instrument for such cases.
The fair price doctrine has some interesting consequences. For instance, it might mean that Lexmark's and Ritz's business plans are unethical, because they are charging more for something (cartridges or processing) than is fair.
However, one might reasonably think that there is a converse to the doctrine. If it is wrong to sell something for more than it is worth, it is wrong to buy something for less than it is worth--unless of course the discount is a GIFT of the seller. (There is nothing wrong with buying a loaf of bread for $1 and giving a voluntary gift of $99 to the baker.) So it might be wrong to hack the camera.
Of course the fair price doctrine is highly controversial. However, it seems to be logically coherent at least. And if it or something like it is true, it might be that such hacking is wrong even if legal.
(Note, too, that one does not have a moral right to exploit someone's honest mistake. Suppose that a video store instead of making you sign a rental agreement by mistake hands you a sale agreement--which you don't bother reading. You come home with your $3 DVD, look at the agreement and discover that it seems you are legally the owner (assume this is so--IANAL). You still have a moral right to return the DVD. Of course in the case of Ritz, the mistake is of a different order, but still similar considerations might apply.)
Wait a second: The ruling did NOT say that the remanufacturer was legally OK. It said that the DMCA was not violated, while expressly bracketing the question of whether there was a run-of-the-mill copyright infringement.
The law often looks at intent. Intent can be hard to gauge, but there are clear cases. On the one hand there is no evidence that the search engine programmers intended to aid illegal activity, just as kitchen knife manufacturers don't intend to aid people to commit murder. On the other hand, if someone has a link with the description "Get the illegal stuff here" or markets a knife as "Great for getting rid of pesky neighbors", then the intent to aid someone with illegal activity is pretty clear.
Of course sometimes one can't gauge intent very accurately at all. Presumably, in a criminal case, in such circumstances the person should count as innocent. Of course "should" is not the same as "would", and I am not a lawyer.
"you own your body" - This is (a) a ridiculous oversimplification, and (b) the conclusion that you can harm yourself in any way you see fit does not follow.
Re.: (b):
For instance, I think some countries (France?) may have laws that prohibit you from destroying works of art of national importance--even if you are the owner, I suspect. Even in the U.S., we have laws against destroying heritage properties (I live in a neighborhood filled with them). And that's even before we get to taxation laws. If you took all your income and burned it before paying taxes on it, the IRS would get you for tax evasion. In cases of grave necessity, too, the state can expropriate your property while paying just compensation.
It's just not the case that you are permitted to do whatever you like with your property. While we may disagree with any one particular such law, it seems implausible to suppose that ALL such laws are wrong. It does not seem possible to run a state without some such laws.
Likewise, the state has the right to demand services from you (whether in exchange for benefits such as protection from crime, or because it has God-endowed authority, or whatever the right theory of the state is). Services such as jury duty, military service when the state is threated by foreign invaders, etc. It does not follow from your owning your body that you may do with it as you wish.
Re.: (a):
To think that our relationship to our bodies is that of ownership is a massive oversimplification. First, it implies an objectionable Cartesian dualism--as if we were one thing and the body were something outside of us. Secondly, it has unacceptable ethical consequences. It makes assault with battery, and even rape, a property crime, for instance. It means that if we accept the possibility of the Government taxing us, we should also accept that the Government could take one of our kidneys--after all, it's mere property.
Does that mean that if I compile a piece of GPL software with, say, bcc and it staticly links against Borland's C library, I can't distribute the binaries? Or can I distribute the binaries as long as my source would work just as well when compiled against a GPL'ed library?
1. Suppose you could put together a bunch of stats that have nothing to do with the content of the paper at hand and use that to predict the grade that a human would have given the paper with 95% accuracy. E.g., you look at the writer's socio-economic level, which high school he went to, what his grades in high school were, how neatly he is dressed, how neat his handwriting is, etc. I am not saying you CAN achieve that kind of correlation (in fact surely you can't because there isn't that kind of correlation between papers by the same person, I suspect), but what if you could? Isn't it obvious this is not a good thing?
2. But here's a constructive use that would save us university faculty significant time. If the software really does grade spelling, grammar and syntax well, one could require of the student that before an essay gets handed in, it gets some high minimum score like 90% or even 98% (unless the student is dyslexic or something like that). Then we would not have to look at essays that had poor spelling, grammar and syntax, would have to do less red-inking, and would have more time to grade for content. (Which is all I grade for anyway in philosophy; though grammar, spelling, etc. get marked up but don't count unless they get in the way of my understanding.)
If you need a viewer, it MIGHT be enough just to buy any Folio-based product, since I assume they all include the viewer, and the viewer seems to be general purpose. (At least my copy of the viewer which comes with products from www.nlx.com works with multiple databases.) So you could just find the cheapest Folio-based product, and then run it under wine or something like that (unless this requires a Windows license).
But this has nothing to do with macrovision. Moreover, generally the sex and violence scenes are not the non-skippable ones! But who knows, there could be other rules.
But surely if I buy a statue or a painting, I've got a legal right to put duct tape over a part of it that I don't like, just like I have a right to tear pages out of a book I own a copy of. (And it won't do to say that the copyright issues are different. IANAL, but I think all copyright rests in the sculptor and painter, just as it does in the movie case. I think you don't automatically have a right to make copies of a painting you buy an original of.)
What is supposed to be the legal basis for the prohibition? Is it that the CSS license prohibits the DVD player manufacturer from including this functionality, so this manufacturer is violating the contract, or is it that they haven't licensed CSS decryption and are using some derivative of decss that might violate the DMCA, or is it just that showing snipped versions is illegal?
The last would be absurd, even though that's what it sounds like from the article. The first would make sense: if the DVD manufacturer is violating a contract, then that's wrong. The second is more controversial. But as for the third, surely it would not be illegal for a person operating a VCR to have a sheet of paper with a bunch of time codes, and to fast forward appropriately according to the sheet. And if it would be OK for a person to do it, why would it be wrong for the person to deputize a machine to do it?)
Those of us in education feel quite free to show clips from rented videos. Our university counsel has no objection as far as I know (I queried about my own classroom practises). But the fast-forward thing just is the same kind of thing--just think of a bunch of clips.
(Next they'll want to prohibit me from turning my head away from a scene I don't want to watch!)
The Brief DOS-based programmer's text editor in had a fine undo. Don't know whether this dates to before the Mac or not--perhaps not. You could select how many undos are possible in a row.
Isn't there a third logical possibility you haven't considered? Maybe garbage put out belongs to the city or whatever authority is in charge of collection. The act of putting the garbage out would be an implicit transfer of title to the city or other authority. Thus, that authority would have the right to search the garbage, since it belongs to them, while a journalist would not. What does the law say? (I don't know.)
Talking of math and students, there is the Windows version of Macsyma known as Maxima which is open source now. A free alternative to Deriva, Maple and Mathematica for symbolic algebra, calculus, 2D and 3D graphing, etc. A nice thing to include on a CD for students.
One of the companies being sued makes a program that sits between the VCR/DVD and TV, and blanks the screen or mutes the sound at pre-set times. I can't believe anybody would think that showing LESS of a copyrighted film is a copyright violation. Is it thus a copyright violation if a mother covers her child's eyes with her hands during a gruesome scene? Or if I go out during a boring sequence? Is it a copyright violation for a rich person to have a trained servant with a stopwatch take a curtain and cover the screen with it at pre-set times? Would a company training people to do this be sued? Is use of the fast-forward and mute buttons a copyright violation?
This leads to a question. Are movies licensed like software or sold like books?
This could be made to work. Instead of calls to check the dongle--that's dumb--you encrypt various portions of the code. Then, before calling the code, you decrypt it with the keys given by the dongle. After running it, you encrypt it again. True, you can grab the code once it's decrypted. But since the code isn't all decrypted at once, you would need to write a program that watches and grabs upon decryption.
Moreover, the hacker might easily miss more rarely used parts of the code (say, parts of the code using features that aren't always used), so chances are that some part of the code would remain encrypted after one was done, and the pirated program would crash from time to time.
Of course the hacker might search out all calls to access data from the dongle, figure out what data was sent to the dongle then, and decrypt. Each access to the dongle could, however, be disguised to look different (even automatically!) so this couldn't be done by an automated procedure. Even more seriously, the dongle might not be memoryless. Thus, the route by which a program would get to a given routine would affect what key the dongle sends back since it would affect the sequence of past dongle calls. Thus, one couldn't just find the call to the dongle and grab the key from the dongle. One would have to figure out the logic of the program and see what previous dongle calls would have had to be made to be made to get to that part of the code, etc.
Sure, in the end everything is crackable. But this might take a LONG time, and there would be a good chance that the hacker would miss something and the hacked version thus would crash occasionally unexpectedly.
Another nice trick one could use is to run different copyprotection code depending on the year. It would take an average of half a year for the hacker to figure out that his crack was good only for a year, and people with "cracked" copies would notice them stopping working with the new year. Changing system date will fix that, but it will be a nuisance and make buying the program more attractive.
It seems like the fear of algebra that the article thinks many people have has a simple cure. Just keep on doing algebra bit by bit, grade by grade, like they do in other countries.
In Poland, I remember we did the distributive law in grade 2: we were told to use it to do calculations like 47*4=(50-3)*4=50*4-3*4=200-12=188. They didn't teach us long multiplication until grade 3. I also have vivid memories of being taught how to write an "x" (a letter that doesn't occur in Polish) in grade 2 or 3 maths, so I think we must have done simple symbolic manipulation.
One could easily introduce solutions to linear equations like 4x=8 or 5-x=3 in grade 3 or 4, and then more general linear equations in grade 5. If one did these things step by step, building from year to year, instead of the endless arithmetic that is done in the U.S., there would be no need for algebra as a special subject, set apart in a fearsome manner from the maths done all along.
Isn't there a possible copyright problem? To update with a different firmware version requires one to make two copies of a program (the firmware) one probably doesn't own a copy of. The first is the copy made when one downloads it and the second is the copy made in the flash memory of the drive.
This might count as fair use if one owns a drive with the updated firmware, as long as one doesn't have the two drives on at the same time or something like that. But failing that, it seems to be the sort of copying that requires a license (IANAL, though).
It is true that the company many put the firmware on the web, and one might argue that that involves an implicit download and flash-to-device license grant. But I think this would be shaky if the download were marked as "Firmware update for Widget CD-RW Model 3491". Then it seems reasonable to suppose that the implied license applied to Widget CD-RW Model 3491 owners, and not to Widget CD-RW Model 3391 owners.
So there could be legal problems. Of course if one can just patch the old firmware with one's own code to generate the new firmware, then it might be less problematic.
The firmware download site might also have an explicit click-through license.
All the Apple OS's I've installed other than 6.x and 7.5.3 have a click-through license that prohibits installation on anything other than an Apple computer. Strangely, 7.5.3 doesn't have such a prohibition, so it's a good thing to install on emulators. Does OS 9 have such a prohibition?
If all one wants to do is to get organized, one might not need a full PDA. Something cheap like a Sharp 730/770 Wizard (0.9mb for data on 730, 1.9mb for data on 770) might do the trick for $70-80. Chicklet type keyboard, durable clamshell case. Somewhat programmable (see www.ozdev.com for a small development community--I maintain a library for it). One isn't going to fill up the memory with notes, appointments and phone numbers unless one downloads a phonebook or ebooks. Plus one gets the nostalgia trip of being able to do Z80 assembly programming once again (it's Z80 based!) There are some annoyances in the organization features, but most of those can be overcome with freeware add-ons.
Slashdot Mirror
1. While facts are not copyrightable as far as I know (IANAL), still isn't there a "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine? One shouldn't profit from illegal activity. If someone violated BestBuy's copyright, e.g., by photocopying a flyer before release, then there would be a legal (and certainly moral!) problem with FatWallet profiting from the information derived from the illegally made copy.
/. is all for privacy. But isn't this really a privacy issue? Someone has taken BestBuy's private information and published it. That BestBuy is a corporation doesn't mean that their privacy doesn't matter: after all, a corporation is just constituted by a bunch of individuals (shareholders or owners and their employees). I am myself rather minimalistic on alleged rights to privacy, but anybody who thinks I have a right not to have the contents of my private documents published on the web by hackers should surely accord that right to BestBuy.
2. Normally
1. Does that mean that if you are running an ftp server on your system, you can't have the files ANYWHERE on your system, no matter what the permissions of the files are? Or does it only apply to anonymous ftp accounts? What if you have a user named "anonymous" on your system who has a very insecure password?
2. Does every folder on an insecure OS count as "shared"?
There could still be ethical concerns. Ethics can require things the law does not (and vice versa). If you hack the camera, you're getting more than you paid for, more than the seller intended to give you, for less than it cost him to provide it.
It is logically coherent to think this is wrong even if legal. For instance, medieval philosophers like Thomas Aquinas had a "fair price" doctrine on which it is unethical to charge more for something than it is honestly worth. Moreover, it did not matter for the doctrine whether the buyer knew this. (Think of a case where a starving person is sold a loaf of bread, from the only food producer in town, for $100. He knows he's being cheated, but he's still being cheated.) There is something inherently plausible to the fair price doctrine, though it is not something that we would really want to enshrine in law except maybe in extreme cases (not everything unethical should be illegal!), e.g., because the law is just too crude an instrument for such cases.
The fair price doctrine has some interesting consequences. For instance, it might mean that Lexmark's and Ritz's business plans are unethical, because they are charging more for something (cartridges or processing) than is fair.
However, one might reasonably think that there is a converse to the doctrine. If it is wrong to sell something for more than it is worth, it is wrong to buy something for less than it is worth--unless of course the discount is a GIFT of the seller. (There is nothing wrong with buying a loaf of bread for $1 and giving a voluntary gift of $99 to the baker.) So it might be wrong to hack the camera.
Of course the fair price doctrine is highly controversial. However, it seems to be logically coherent at least. And if it or something like it is true, it might be that such hacking is wrong even if legal.
(Note, too, that one does not have a moral right to exploit someone's honest mistake. Suppose that a video store instead of making you sign a rental agreement by mistake hands you a sale agreement--which you don't bother reading. You come home with your $3 DVD, look at the agreement and discover that it seems you are legally the owner (assume this is so--IANAL). You still have a moral right to return the DVD. Of course in the case of Ritz, the mistake is of a different order, but still similar considerations might apply.)
And a footnote notes that there is a big collection of read-alound enabled texts available only to the blind.
Wait a second: The ruling did NOT say that the remanufacturer was legally OK. It said that the DMCA was not violated, while expressly bracketing the question of whether there was a run-of-the-mill copyright infringement.
The law often looks at intent. Intent can be hard to gauge, but there are clear cases. On the one hand there is no evidence that the search engine programmers intended to aid illegal activity, just as kitchen knife manufacturers don't intend to aid people to commit murder. On the other hand, if someone has a link with the description "Get the illegal stuff here" or markets a knife as "Great for getting rid of pesky neighbors", then the intent to aid someone with illegal activity is pretty clear.
Of course sometimes one can't gauge intent very accurately at all. Presumably, in a criminal case, in such circumstances the person should count as innocent. Of course "should" is not the same as "would", and I am not a lawyer.
"you own your body" - This is (a) a ridiculous oversimplification, and (b) the conclusion that you can harm yourself in any way you see fit does not follow.
Re.: (b):
For instance, I think some countries (France?) may have laws that prohibit you from destroying works of art of national importance--even if you are the owner, I suspect. Even in the U.S., we have laws against destroying heritage properties (I live in a neighborhood filled with them). And that's even before we get to taxation laws. If you took all your income and burned it before paying taxes on it, the IRS would get you for tax evasion. In cases of grave necessity, too, the state can expropriate your property while paying just compensation.
It's just not the case that you are permitted to do whatever you like with your property. While we may disagree with any one particular such law, it seems implausible to suppose that ALL such laws are wrong. It does not seem possible to run a state without some such laws.
Likewise, the state has the right to demand services from you (whether in exchange for benefits such as protection from crime, or because it has God-endowed authority, or whatever the right theory of the state is). Services such as jury duty, military service when the state is threated by foreign invaders, etc. It does not follow from your owning your body that you may do with it as you wish.
Re.: (a):
To think that our relationship to our bodies is that of ownership is a massive oversimplification. First, it implies an objectionable Cartesian dualism--as if we were one thing and the body were something outside of us. Secondly, it has unacceptable ethical consequences. It makes assault with battery, and even rape, a property crime, for instance. It means that if we accept the possibility of the Government taxing us, we should also accept that the Government could take one of our kidneys--after all, it's mere property.
Does that mean that if I compile a piece of GPL software with, say, bcc and it staticly links against Borland's C library, I can't distribute the binaries?
Or can I distribute the binaries as long as my source would work just as well when compiled against a GPL'ed library?
1. Suppose you could put together a bunch of stats that have nothing to do with the content of the paper at hand and use that to predict the grade that a human would have given the paper with 95% accuracy. E.g., you look at the writer's socio-economic level, which high school he went to, what his grades in high school were, how neatly he is dressed, how neat his handwriting is, etc. I am not saying you CAN achieve that kind of correlation (in fact surely you can't because there isn't that kind of correlation between papers by the same person, I suspect), but what if you could? Isn't it obvious this is not a good thing?
2. But here's a constructive use that would save us university faculty significant time. If the software really does grade spelling, grammar and syntax well, one could require of the student that before an essay gets handed in, it gets some high minimum score like 90% or even 98% (unless the student is dyslexic or something like that). Then we would not have to look at essays that had poor spelling, grammar and syntax, would have to do less red-inking, and would have more time to grade for content. (Which is all I grade for anyway in philosophy; though grammar, spelling, etc. get marked up but don't count unless they get in the way of my understanding.)
Well, that vocal minority may be tying up their customer support lines--that, too, costs them.
If you need a viewer, it MIGHT be enough just to buy any Folio-based product, since I assume they all include the viewer, and the viewer seems to be general purpose. (At least my copy of the viewer which comes with products from www.nlx.com works with multiple databases.) So you could just find the cheapest Folio-based product, and then run it under wine or something like that (unless this requires a Windows license).
But this has nothing to do with macrovision. Moreover, generally the sex and violence scenes are not the non-skippable ones! But who knows, there could be other rules.
But surely if I buy a statue or a painting, I've got a legal right to put duct tape over a part of it that I don't like, just like I have a right to tear pages out of a book I own a copy of. (And it won't do to say that the copyright issues are different. IANAL, but I think all copyright rests in the sculptor and painter, just as it does in the movie case. I think you don't automatically have a right to make copies of a painting you buy an original of.)
What is supposed to be the legal basis for the prohibition? Is it that the CSS license prohibits the DVD player manufacturer from including this functionality, so this manufacturer is violating the contract, or is it that they haven't licensed CSS decryption and are using some derivative of decss that might violate the DMCA, or is it just that showing snipped versions is illegal?
The last would be absurd, even though that's what it sounds like from the article. The first would make sense: if the DVD manufacturer is violating a contract, then that's wrong. The second is more controversial. But as for the third, surely it would not be illegal for a person operating a VCR to have a sheet of paper with a bunch of time codes, and to fast forward appropriately according to the sheet. And if it would be OK for a person to do it, why would it be wrong for the person to deputize a machine to do it?)
Those of us in education feel quite free to show clips from rented videos. Our university counsel has no objection as far as I know (I queried about my own classroom practises). But the fast-forward thing just is the same kind of thing--just think of a bunch of clips.
(Next they'll want to prohibit me from turning my head away from a scene I don't want to watch!)
The Brief DOS-based programmer's text editor in had a fine undo. Don't know whether this dates to before the Mac or not--perhaps not. You could select how many undos are possible in a row.
Isn't there a third logical possibility you haven't considered? Maybe garbage put out belongs to the city or whatever authority is in charge of collection. The act of putting the garbage out would be an implicit transfer of title to the city or other authority. Thus, that authority would have the right to search the garbage, since it belongs to them, while a journalist would not. What does the law say? (I don't know.)
Talking of math and students, there is the Windows version of Macsyma known as Maxima which is open source now. A free alternative to Deriva, Maple and Mathematica for symbolic algebra, calculus, 2D and 3D graphing, etc. A nice thing to include on a CD for students.
One of the companies being sued makes a program that sits between the VCR/DVD and TV, and blanks the screen or mutes the sound at pre-set times. I can't believe anybody would think that showing LESS of a copyrighted film is a copyright violation. Is it thus a copyright violation if a mother covers her child's eyes with her hands during a gruesome scene? Or if I go out during a boring sequence? Is it a copyright violation for a rich person to have a trained servant with a stopwatch take a curtain and cover the screen with it at pre-set times? Would a company training people to do this be sued? Is use of the fast-forward and mute buttons a copyright violation?
This leads to a question. Are movies licensed like software or sold like books?
ARP
This could be made to work. Instead of calls to check the dongle--that's dumb--you encrypt various portions of the code. Then, before calling the code, you decrypt it with the keys given by the dongle. After running it, you encrypt it again. True, you can grab the code once it's decrypted. But since the code isn't all decrypted at once, you would need to write a program that watches and grabs upon decryption.
Moreover, the hacker might easily miss more rarely used parts of the code (say, parts of the code using features that aren't always used), so chances are that some part of the code would remain encrypted after one was done, and the pirated program would crash from time to time.
Of course the hacker might search out all calls to access data from the dongle, figure out what data was sent to the dongle then, and decrypt. Each access to the dongle could, however, be disguised to look different (even automatically!) so this couldn't be done by an automated procedure. Even more seriously, the dongle might not be memoryless. Thus, the route by which a program would get to a given routine would affect what key the dongle sends back since it would affect the sequence of past dongle calls. Thus, one couldn't just find the call to the dongle and grab the key from the dongle. One would have to figure out the logic of the program and see what previous dongle calls would have had to be made to be made to get to that part of the code, etc.
Sure, in the end everything is crackable. But this might take a LONG time, and there would be a good chance that the hacker would miss something and the hacked version thus would crash occasionally unexpectedly.
Another nice trick one could use is to run different copyprotection code depending on the year. It would take an average of half a year for the hacker to figure out that his crack was good only for a year, and people with "cracked" copies would notice them stopping working with the new year. Changing system date will fix that, but it will be a nuisance and make buying the program more attractive.
ARP
It seems like the fear of algebra that the article thinks many people have has a simple cure. Just keep on doing algebra bit by bit, grade by grade, like they do in other countries.
In Poland, I remember we did the distributive law in grade 2: we were told to use it to do calculations like 47*4=(50-3)*4=50*4-3*4=200-12=188. They didn't teach us long multiplication until grade 3. I also have vivid memories of being taught how to write an "x" (a letter that doesn't occur in Polish) in grade 2 or 3 maths, so I think we must have done simple symbolic manipulation.
One could easily introduce solutions to linear equations like 4x=8 or 5-x=3 in grade 3 or 4, and then more general linear equations in grade 5. If one did these things step by step, building from year to year, instead of the endless arithmetic that is done in the U.S., there would be no need for algebra as a special subject, set apart in a fearsome manner from the maths done all along.
ARP
Isn't there a possible copyright problem? To update with a different firmware version requires one to make two copies of a program (the firmware) one probably doesn't own a copy of. The first is the copy made when one downloads it and the second is the copy made in the flash memory of the drive.
This might count as fair use if one owns a drive with the updated firmware, as long as one doesn't have the two drives on at the same time or something like that. But failing that, it seems to be the sort of copying that requires a license (IANAL, though).
It is true that the company many put the firmware on the web, and one might argue that that involves an implicit download and flash-to-device license grant. But I think this would be shaky if the download were marked as "Firmware update for Widget CD-RW Model 3491". Then it seems reasonable to suppose that the implied license applied to Widget CD-RW Model 3491 owners, and not to Widget CD-RW Model 3391 owners.
So there could be legal problems. Of course if one can just patch the old firmware with one's own code to generate the new firmware, then it might be less problematic.
The firmware download site might also have an explicit click-through license.
But IANAL.
ARP
All the Apple OS's I've installed other than 6.x and 7.5.3 have a click-through license that prohibits installation on anything other than an Apple computer. Strangely, 7.5.3 doesn't have such a prohibition, so it's a good thing to install on emulators. Does OS 9 have such a prohibition?
If all one wants to do is to get organized, one
might not need a full PDA. Something cheap like a Sharp 730/770 Wizard (0.9mb for data on 730, 1.9mb for data on 770) might do the trick for $70-80. Chicklet type keyboard, durable clamshell case. Somewhat programmable (see www.ozdev.com for a small development community--I maintain a library for it).
One isn't going to fill up the memory with notes, appointments and phone numbers unless one downloads a phonebook or ebooks. Plus one gets the nostalgia trip of being able to do Z80 assembly programming once again (it's Z80 based!) There are some annoyances in the organization features, but most of those can be overcome with freeware add-ons.
Alex
Can one also show up at the permanent collection stations and grab stuff?
But you then pay that computer in Delaware for
making your purchases. Alex