Can &quot;Right to Repair&quot; laws (or other laws) require a company to open source their proprietary firmware? AFAIK, there are no prohibitions here that require omission of specifics, so I will be specific. Over the years, I have invested a fair sum of money on products made by a company called Sonos. Fairly recently (2018 IIRC), Sonos &quot;went public&quot;; this is approximately the same time my issues with them commenced. Wikipedia REF on Sonos. My Sonos sound system began to experience various malfunctions - some were resolved by Sonos tech support, some were not. Various rumors and statements were circulated regarding limited support for Sonos' &quot;legacy&quot; products (ALL of my Sonos equipment was purchased prior to 2018). However, the situation is more serious than Sonos has admitted. Recently, I became aware of a Sonos product flaw that is potentially far more serious than failure to play music - a computer security flaw that significantly increases my risk exposure. An update to the firmware is needed to effect a repair, and eliminate the security flaw. Repairing this flaw will require a repair to the system firmware - an update that Sonos has chosen not to make available. Instead, Sonos' &quot;solution&quot; is to offer a small discount on the price of their new systems, and commit the old systems to the landfill. The security flaw (NTLM v1 &amp; SMB v1) is in open-source software modules that Sonos elected to incorporate into their firmware. The flaws in the open source software were recognized and patched by its open source authors years ago, and are readily available. However, repair of the firmware requires that Sonos provide documentation on how to integrate the patched software into the binary blob of firmware that Sonos claims is proprietary. For those interested, here's a link to an online discussion of this issue at Sonos' website in which I participated. Despite a claim made in this discussion, Sonos has not released the source code, nor any details that would allow one to repair the network security defect they have ignored. Rather, Sonos has simply claimed that it &quot;is not possible&quot; to remedy this defect. If you read through the discussion, it seems apparent to me that most of the other participants in the discussion (customers, Sonos employees?) accept that claim, and are happy to continue doing business with Sonos. I'm not quite ready to admit defeat. I've read a wee bit about the &quot;Right to Repair&quot; laws being enacted in some states REF 1, and it seems the Feds are pursuing enforcement also REF 2. My question is whether or not this &quot;Sonos Situation&quot; is covered by these &quot;Right to Repair&quot; laws - or are there other laws that may be a better &quot;fit&quot; for these circumstances? Or - am I simply an unfortunate customer of a company that is pursuing its business interests in an entirely legal fashion, and has no liabilities here?
The Right to Repair generally talks about hardware, not firmware or software, and only to the point of restoring &quot;original&quot; functionality. For example, RTR would make it prohibited to have Apple require that they fix your phone battery for hundreds of dollars and make it impossible for you, or a third-party shop, to do the repair instead. In Sonos case, RTR would imply that if your speaker blew a fuse (or capacitor, etc), you should have the right to fix that yourself, and they should provide you with reasonable instructions and hardware to do so. That said, if you look at the Sonos OSS references, at least a few of the licenses suggest that you can't release derivatives under more restrictive languages. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any case law that establishes this would work, and it would be really expensive to try and find out. There's also the problem of Intellectual Property and Copyright that they could try to argue as reasons why they can't release the proprietary bits that make their hardware run. Any other options would be, unfortunately, illegal, in part because of the DMCA. Edit: Looking further into this, I found that there is H.R.4006 - Fair Repair Act, which, if passed, would require manufacturers of some hardware to offer diagnostic tools and public copies of firmware. In addition, there are also actions being taken by iFixit at the Copyright Office to allow an exception to DMCA violations for the purposes of patching firmware. Also, the President of the United States issued an Executive Order that, among other things, instructs the FTC to set rules against anticompetitive repair policies. Much of this has moved forward in just the last year, so it's relatively new to me, but it sounds like an even stronger indicator that Sonos is probably not going to have that defense much longer, unless they totally abandon their old hardware, in which case, it may become legal to hack your own firmware.
People running web servers are generally liable for contributory culpability, when some user breaks the law by putting the material on the server. There are legal mechanisms for relieving the server guy from this burden. The best-known mechanism is "DMCA takedown", where you publish contact information so that an offended person can serve up a proper legal claim that you are distributing material that they own copyright to. If you follow the rules, you may enjoy "safe harbor" protection against contributory liability: one of the requirements is that you have to take infringing material down. The specific requirements can depend on the nature of the liability and jurisdiction, but generally involves a "hands off" involvement where the person has no knowledge of what's going on on his server. So just disclaiming responsibility does not work. There are other more serious violations, such as distribution of child porn or transmission of top secret information. Jurisdiction is not totally central to internet questions, and I could sue you (the server guy) in US courts, or (depending on the offense: copyright infringement of a particular item) in UK courts. Nailing this down specifically to Sweden is harder, but recall that The Pirate Bay had a whopping judgment against them.
Sure, you can. But if you, from the US, contract with and pay someone outside the US and then use the results of that effort - the reverse-engineered code, either directly in violation of copyright or to find workarounds - within the US, you may not be culpable in a criminal sense (depending on different jurisdictions and trade/IP agreements), but you certainly would be liable in a civil sense. If the US based software developer (I assume a US-based software company, as you said "outside the US") tracks you down, they can open a civil action against you for any damages they want to claim, including theft of IP, loss of profits, EULA violations, and on and on, because you posses and are using reverse engineered code. How much money do you have to lose?
It is legal, and good policy, because the later explanation could create conflicting policies and notions as to what the &quot;agreement&quot; is. The TOS is probably created by a lawyer who interviewed the website owner to figure out what they wanted, then wrote legal language to do that. If you ask tech support how to interpret the TOS, you probably are not getting a legally-correct statement (assuming that the tech support guy isn't also a lawyer). Rather than take a risk that a customer would defend their action in court by arguing &quot;they said I could!&quot;, the website may elect to not make promises that they don't want to keep. Instead, if you want to understand the agreement, you hire your own lawyer, then propose a hypothetical action, to see how the law interprets the language of the agreement. For example &quot;can I rent out my Netflix password so that other people can use it?&quot;. The lawyer would then read the TOS and relevant cases law, and would advise you whether this is allowed under the TOS (it is not). Alternatively, you could read up on relevant aspects of the law and figure it out yourself. Website TOS is basically driven by copyright law, the technical necessity of some kind of automatic copying in order to use a web page, and the legal requirement that you can't copy without permission of the copyright holder. The TOS is the set of conditions that you must satisfy in order to be permitted to use the site. So many questions reduce to issues of copyright law and permission to copy *can you legally &quot;permit&quot; the copying of materials you upload?).
There is also the part that says &quot;except as expressly permitted by law&quot;. In the USA, you are allowed to run the software. This means the operating system making the copy that transfers the software from your hard drive to the RAM of the computer, and all necessary changes there. And this includes modifications to relocate the software, or to protect it against certain attacks by hackers, and I'm confident that Apple checked that it includes translating x86 machine code to ARM machine code and store the translated copy together with the original. Similar things have been done already around 2000 or so, and no software manufacturer has ever complained.
I would argue that no, there is no copyright for the restored work. Independent copyright is only possible for any original material added, as previously discussed on this site. In this case, the added work was a technical process rather than a creative process, and technical processes cannot be protected by copyright. Copyright licenses would therefore be ineffective. However, I believe one could still impose a license based on owning the copy as opposed to the copyright (contract might be a better term in this case). However, if a third party managed to obtain a copy through some other avenue, any such contract would not be binding on them and nothing could be enforced against them unlike with copyright laws. Another way a license might be imposed is through patent protections, as technical processes can be protected via patents. However, I'm not as familiar with patent law, and this doesn't appear to be the claim being made.
If the patent lawyer &quot;hears about&quot; such failed patents from clients, and then uses the client's work and modifies them into successful patent filings, that would seem to be a clear conflict of interest, just as a business lawyer cannot use info learned from a client to make his own business deals, unless the client grants an OK. But if the patent lawyer just hears through shoptalk, or through communication by, perhaps, patent examiners that the lawyer works with, I don't see any conflict of interest, although as the comment by Eugene Styer suggests, there is likely to be enough prior art to make the patent invalid.
Software cannot be patented although it does have copyright. Hardware can be the subject of a patent, however, that would not cover any software aspects such as the programming built into a PROM. While it is possible to render any software into an integrated circuit, practically, anything simple enough to make this feasible is probably too simple to patent.