Texas Instruments: still harassing hobbyists
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Texas Instruments has dropped its spurious DMCA threats against hobbyists who’d blogged about potential mods to the company’s programmable graphing calculators.
Researchers were able to reverse-engineer signing keys, “allowing modders to install custom operating systems and unlock new functionality in the calculators’ hardware,” said the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).
In response , “TI unleashed a torrent of demand letters claiming that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) required the hobbyists to take down commentary about and links to the keys,” it said.
Texas Instruments (TI) ultimately “failed to stand behind their misguided claim that calculator hobbyists violated copyright law by having public, online discussions about techniques to get more functionality from TI calculators,” says Jennifer Granick in Deep Links.
But that doesn’t mean the matter is closed.
The company continues to “dig itself into new holes by issuing more improper take-down letters,” she says, stating the foundation had represented three bloggers being harassed under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The EFF contacted TI on behalf of the three “explaining why the company’s legal claim was wrong, and stated that the men would restore their posts absent legitimate objection from the company,” says Granick, going on »»»
TI ignored both the letter and the deadline, and so the posts are now back online. Mr. Smith’s post is here, Mr. Wilson’s here, and Mr. Cross’s here. You can find EFF’s letter to TI here.
While it’s no surprise that TI gave up when it found itself in the legal wrong, it is scandalous that the company continues to send its improper demands to other bloggers and hosting companies.
In fact, TI has sent an identical take-down demand to Mr. Smith’s university complaining about the same OS keys having been posted on our client’s student webpage, and demanding that the school take the materials down from that URL.
Smith filed a DMCA Section 512 counternotice to continue the fight, says the EFF, adding:
” Hopefully other calculator hobbyists who have received TI’s baseless demands will consider standing up against the erroneous claim that reverse-engineered OS signing keys are illegal numbers that can not be published, discussed or linked to.”
Stay tuned
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
reverse-engineer signing keys - Texas Instruments threatens calculator hobbyists, October 14, 2009
Deep Links – Hey, Texas Instruments — Stop Digging Holes, October 29, 2009
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November 2nd, 2009 at 11:01 am
Numbers cannot be copyrighted.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:16 am
Numbers can be copyrighted. Every program/file on your computer is represented as a long binary number, a string of 1’s and 0’s.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
my response. In binary:
Sorry – had to edit it down – it was screwing up the page, as was EE’s, similar message – Jon
011011000110111101
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=text+to+binary
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:12 pm
01101110011010010110001101100101
That doesn’t mean TI has a leg to stand on though. There are limits to copyright, and the TI lawyers don’t seem to know them.
Sorry – had to edit it down – it was screwing up the page, as was Lando’s, similar message – Jon
http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Binary_Conversion/Binary_To_Text.asp