Legal situation

[Serg l]

Another alternative, chosen by "western" FOS community is to pretend that
they never seen the TI code and fully reverse engineered the software to
run on Calypso chipset. This is the OsmocomBB approach. While it is still
questionable, generally hardware ownership rights are transferred from the
manufacturer to the user at the time of sale, so if you load your own
software into Calypso chipset it is a pretty legal activity. Another factor
of the equation is use of shared licensed radio spectrum. It is a separate
can of worms by itself if you want to be 100% compliant. However from
observing all the penalties imposed by FCC to various parties, even big
guys cannot follow all the intricacies to the existing laws.

On Sat, Sep 2, 2017 at 3:56 PM, Mychaela Falconia <
mychaela.falconia at gmail.com> wrote:

> viva astoria <viva.astoria at yandex.ru> wrote:
>
> > Do you know what these legal restrictions were?
>
> Openmoko had the source for TI's modem firmware from their parent
> company FIC, but they maintained it as proprietary, releasing only
> binaries stripped of all symbolic info.  They kept saying that if they
> did otherwise (i.e., if they had released whatever source they had in
> direct disregard of copyrights and NDAs as the user community has been
> demanding for years), they would have been sued by TI.
>
> > And will freecalypso be able to overcome them? How?
>
> The simplest way would be to move to a country like North Korea or
> Iran that does not have any copyright treaties with USA or France or
> Germany and would not recognize TI's copyright claims as legitimate.
> As a specific example, I know of one Iranian government contractor
> company who is already using FreeCalypso firmware on their own custom
> hardware that includes a Calypso modem.
>
> If you want FreeCalypso to be legal in some country that is not like
> North Korea or Iran, you could try convincing your local legislators
> to pass a special law that would make TI's copyright claims null and
> void in your country XYZ.
>
> Alternatively you could try talking to TI and beg and plead with them
> to voluntarily relinquish their copyright claims on their very dead
> and very ancient abandonware and release it into the public domain.  I
> am guessing that you would probably need to wave a few million dollars
> in front of them just to get their attention.
>
> M~
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