The legal system sometimes has definitions of copying that aren't that straightforward. I've seen in a copyright context judges talk about a computer loading software into RAM being copying.
Intel microcode comes with a license: https://bugs.gentoo.org/664134
IANAL, but this is a general concept of exhaustion of IP rights when the IP is sold as a part of physical medium, see (28) and article 4 of EU copyright directive 2001/29.
> The legal system sometimes has definitions of copying that aren't that straightforward. I've seen in a copyright context judges talk about a computer loading software into RAM being copying
This is handled in (33) of the directive:
"The exclusive right of reproduction should be subject to an exception to allow certain acts of temporary reproduction, which are transient or incidental reproductions, forming an integral and essential part of a technological process and carried out for the sole purpose of enabling either efficient transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary, or a lawful use of a work or other subject-matter to be made."
If it can go wrong it will, and if software isn't free then its owners will do things that the users really do not like. In this case, if they can fix bugs they can reduce functionality post-hoc. That is consequential. It is better to have freedom or certainty as to what a device does.
As a practical example, I have never heard anyone considering the freedomness of firmware in eMMC flash memory chips. But the talk "eMMC hacking, or: how I fixed long-dead Galaxy S3 phones" from CCC reveals that actually, Samsung eMMC chips have an undocumented debug interface to read/write the RAM of the firmware running on the ARM core inside the eMMC chip.
And if I'm not mistaken, this isn't about kernel blobs (which run on the CPU as kernel code), only code that gets loaded on devices (including CPU microcode).