FreeCalypso hardware update

[Mychaela Falconia]

Serg wrote:

> As long as there is no product offered on the
> market the infringement could be protected by fair use clause.

You know full well that offering end-user-usable hardware products on
the market is my primary goal.  It is true, however, that I engage in
this "business" with the full expectation of it being strictly a loss
in economic terms and never a profit, hence I do consider it a form of
non-profit activity.

Back in the USSR we even had an official term for such enterprises:
"planovo-ubytochnoe predpriyatie", literally translating as "enterprise
planned to operate at a loss" - an activity that is deemed necessary,
but is expected to be a loss economically.

> Even if a limited number of FC boards will be made, it
> is still all experimental stuff.

While it is unfortunate that the current physical form factor of our
only available modem product (FCDEV3B) puts it into the category of
"development" or "experimental" and I lack the budget to repackage it
into more of an official end product form factor (the needed budget
would be on the order of 10 to 30 kUSD), the core FreeCalypso modem
solution aside from the packaging form factor is very much a turnkey
finished product, not experimental in the slightest.

> 4. There is a good chance that TI will not come forward and demand
> anything, however the easy way to protect would be registering LLC and
> acting from the name of that entity, rather than an individual.

I already have such an LLC, named Falconia Partners LLC - but in
relation to FreeCalypso I use it to stand as the official manufacturer
of record for IMEI and radio compliance purposes, and NOT for the
purpose of trying to hide myself from TI.  I don't hide, I stand tall
and proud under my own chosen female name which also became my legal
name in USA as of 2016-03-02.

> In this case it would be possible just close the shop and walk away,

I will never, ever, ever walk away from my baby - that is NOT what a
true Mother does.  If they attack the freecalypso.org domain name
registration or the server hosting, I may have to switch to operating
as a Tor hidden service whose physical location and ISP service path
cannot be easily tracked for the purpose of shutting it down - but I
will never stop developing, promoting and distributing my FreeCalypso
work, and I don't hide who I am.

> There is another complication here, the codebase
> contains components which were licensed to TI by other parties, so we are
> looking at obtaining multiple releases, which could be difficult.

In TCS211 and in FreeCalypso (markedly unlike TCS3.2/LoCosto) there is
only one such non-TI component: the Nucleus PLUS RTOS.

> 5. It would be highly desirable to rewrite entire codebase using existing
> sources as a reference implementation. This is completely legal

It may be legal, but I can never support or endorse such an approach,
as any such reimplementation attempt will always be hopelessly inferior
to the original.

I believe that the most proper approach would be to exercise the power
of eminent domain aka compulsory purchase.  Any government, no matter
how small, even a tiny city or town government has the power of eminent
domain, and they could exercise this power by terminating TI's socially
unacceptable claim of copyright and paying them a one-time monetary
compensation for their loss, compensation based on reasonable fair
market value of the "IP" in question, not whatever crazy unreasonable
amount TI might demand.  I believe that a reasonable compensation to
TI for forcible compulsory purchase of their IP would be on the order
of 10 kUSD.

I am not able to offer up 10 kUSD from my own pocket at the present
moment because I need to get my sex correction surgery done first, but
after I get this surgery done (probably another couple of years), I
will make another offer to TI, 10 kUSD in exchange for them releasing
their code under a BSD license.  If they don't agree, the next step
would be to shop around for a friendly government anywhere in the world
(it's a big world with widely different politics and ideologies) who
could do the eminent domain / compulsory purchase procedure, with me
donating the 10 kUSD to the great public cause.

In the meantime until then, the simple solution is to put the entirety
of the legal risk on me personally and not on any other person or
company or entity.  The way I see it, if you buy a FreeCalypso hw
product from me and merely use it as a user, then YOU are not
committing any copyright infringement, only I am.  As an analogy,
imagine if Samsung were to sue Apple saying that Apple's products
infringe on some Samsung IP.  In that scenario only Apple as the maker
and seller of infringing products could be held legally liable, and
most certainly NOT every Joe and Jane who bought a product from an
Apple store.  If you buy a product from a store and use it as intended
(i.e., don't use it as a murder weapon or as a tool to disrupt
networks or whatever) and then some judge finds that the product you
have legally purchased contains some parts that infringe on someone
else's IP, it is a problem only for the maker and seller of that
product, and NOT a problem for you as a mere consumer-buyer of that
product.

The same argument can be extended to post-sale firmware updates.
Suppose your iPhone receives an over-the-air firmware update from
Apple, and the software in this update (which may not have been
present in the phone at the moment you physically bought it) is deemed
to infringe on someone else's copyright.  Once again it would be a
problem for Apple as the distrubutor of that fw update and NOT for you
as its recipient - there is no conceivable way that any judge would
rule otherwise.  Thus if you download an official FreeCalypso firmware
update for your legally-bought FreeCalypso hw product from
ftp.freecalypso.org, you are no different from an iPhone user
receiving and installing an update from Apple, and you are similarly
protected against any legal claims against you.

The only person or entity who could possibly be sued or prosecuted for
copyright infringement under this arrangement is ME, and I don't mind:
if my predecessor some 2000 y ago was perfectly willing to be nailed
up on a cross for his beliefs and for doing what he felt was right,
then exposing myself to what I consider to be a very tiny risk of
being sued or prosecuted for copyright infringement is the least I can
do.

Hasta la Victoria, Siempre,
Mychaela aka The Mother