Re: LCC and blobs
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
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