On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 02:13:05PM -0500, Luke Schierer wrote: > The aim/icq servers do not currently, but could at the flip of a switch > (and have in the past), required you to send a hash of a specified > segment of a specified file from the official (copyrighted) winaim > client. If I am understanding this thread correctly, that would be > roughly the same as a physical device with firmware requirement for the > purposes of this discussion.
I'm undecided where to put this case, which has come up before. The actual hash is certainly uncopyrightable (probably being just a 32- or 128-bit number); the whole thing exists purely to make competing implementations harder. Intuitively, it seems more legitimate to use a third-party hash server to handle these (which has been done) than it is to stick proprietary firmware on a server and wget it; it's being done to work around copyright abuse, not to work around the Social Contract. I can't get beyond intuition on this, though. In any case, none of that applies to firmware, so it doesn't help the parallel. It'd be useful to have a real-life example of a server that needs to be sent proprietary data for a "legitimate" reason (in the sense that a device needing to be sent firmware is "legitimate"). -- Glenn Maynard
