Re:New Raspberry Pi 4 Firmware Lowers Temperature by 3-5°C
by hedora on Sunday June 30, 2019 @10:09PM
(#20321939)
The first sale doctrine might save them.
If I buy your patented thing from you, that exhausts your patent rights for that copy of the thing. If I modify it, and do something you don’t like with it, you can’t come after me under patent law.
Note that I didn’t say anything about contract or copyright law—they may have signed something saying they wouldn’t reverse engineer the chip, or the sale could come with an end user Eula to that effect.
Re:New Raspberry Pi 4 Firmware Lowers Temperature by 3-5°C
by garmaine on Sunday June 30, 2019 @10:11PM
(#20321944)
You're assuming RPT would write the firmware. There's no reason that has to be the case.
Re:New Raspberry Pi 4 Firmware Lowers Temperature by 3-5°C
by gjsman-1000 on Monday July 01, 2019 @10:47AM
(#20325773)
You can find open-source firmware attempts by the community, but they haven't gotten much farther than booting the Pi.
I'm just saying that if RPT tried to write their own firmware, they could be in big legal trouble, so I wouldn't expect any open-source firmware from RPT anytime soon.
Edit: Even if the RPT wrote their own firmware, not from Broadcom, and released it, they would still risk being sued to pieces for patent violations galore. After all, if you license H.265 alone, there are over 1,100+ pages in the Table of Contents alone just listing all of the patents worldwide on it.
Edit 2: And they could be possibly sued by Broadcom for violating the IP sharing agreement used for developing the chip by developing an open-source blob software.