Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I'm currently toying with a similar process which I think falls under the interoperability exemption:
- Get an apk online, you haven't accepted a EULA.
- Run jadx to get some code to work with
- Ask Claude to extract the protocol specification cleanly for a Bluetooth device with capabilities etc.
- Use Claude to implement a version as a TUI/CLI in go, rust, whatever.
I get to use a device I own with a local Bluetooth connection from my machine, maybe Home Assistant. I do not contact any online services (there are none anyway in that case).
Since it's to avoid getting locked in with proprietary OS, it's a clean room reversing through a spec and an LLM produced a non copyrightable output... Can I just release this however I want? Probably a basic MIT or CC0, whatever...
by RRRA - decompiling the apk is where you might trip up against DMCA etc. I've been doing this exact same thing with great success, if there's a mobile app you have the keys to unlock any bluetooth device (and maybe turn it into a Home Assistant component while you're at it).by luma
- Gymnopedie No 1 was one of the pieces I learned as a primary school student as a mediocre and undedicated pianist. The reverse engineering is impressive and generally useful, but really learning that piece all the way through could be even more rewarding, then you can use 10 fingers and two feet to make it sound like YOUR ultimate version, not just your words. Perhaps Claude truly nailed it in your taste and you want to be able to reproduce it reliably without automation: record one phrase at a time and try to minimize the about of variance between yours and the MIDI. Maybe some visual feedback would help and be clever, but usually using your ear is the most productive.by reilly3000
- The funny thing is - I'm virtually tone deaf and can't play the piano. It's my wife's piano, but when we bought it, I had the player system installed, so I could get some enjoyment out of it.by jmpman
- If you want legal advice, ask a lawyer and pay for it. If you want to publish a cool hack, publish a cool hack.by aftbit
- Ideally someone random on github would post the same thing, so you don't have to. That would be a fortunate coincidence but I'm pretty sure these things happen.by webprofusion
- The nature of these tools is that your post and the device should suffice to replicate so in some sense you have already published the encoder and the decoder.by arjie
- I imagine it hexdumps it and looks for patterns.by loa_in_
- Release the code, let the whole world copy it, if they sent you a cease and desist letter, just take it down and say 'oops sorry'by Kuyawa
- You are free to interpret this comment as prohibition or as my blessing, but...
If it matters, ask your lawyer.
If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
Or to put it another way, trademarks (you've mentioned two) and copyrights (it's a crapshoot) are complex. And in some jurisdictions (notably the US) anybody can sue anyone for anything.
Your risk aversion is yours, not someone else's. Your financial and legal wherewithal is likewise yours.
by brudgers - I might just email the company. If they object, I won't make my GitHub repo public.by jmpman
- > And in some jurisdictions (notably the US) anybody can sue anyone for anything.
That should be the case in all jurisdictions. The justice system exists so that, if I feel treated unfairly, I can go to the state to settle the question whether/how much that is true. If there are issues where I cannot go to court, what am I supposed to do? Go fight you over the issue?
What differs (a lot) is how effectively the system rejects frivolous/unjust cases, how much time/money it costs you to defend yourself against remaining claims, and what systems there are to prevent people from going to court (having affordable care will prevent people from taking some medical claims to court; obligatory car insurance means most fender bender cases get handled by insurance companies, etc(
by Someone - Don’t ask Hacker News for legal advice. If you really want to know the answer, ask a lawyer.by jdlshore
- On the other hand, this is Hacker news, so my first inclination of a response was going to be something like this:
"Get some small amount of bitcoin and pay a VPS hosting provider in Moldova for a year's service on a $15-per-month equivalent KVM VM and put what you know on there anonymously as static content, then publish the link here."
Not that a sufficiently dedicated nation state federal crime agency or intelligence apparatus probably couldn't trace back to you, but it raises the bar for something like random civil lawsuits from piano companies.
by walrus01 - Standard answer fit to keep the parasites fed. There is no "the answer" here, there are many answers depending on which lawyers you ask and how much you can afford to feed them.
Just release the code somewhere, anonymously, it isn't yours anyway.
by Leonard_of_Q - This whole writeup is basically the verbatim prompt recipe for anyone to just whip it up themselves.
Blocking the final result is no longer a real block, when all it requires is a vague prompt to replicate it.
We've entered a strange territory.
by Silasdev - Aside: if you want a source of high quality Piano MIDI recordings, you should check out the MAESTRO dataset: https://magenta.withgoogle.com/datasets/maestro
> The dataset contains about 200 hours of paired audio and MIDI recordings from ten years of International Piano-e-Competition. The MIDI data includes key strike velocities and sustain/sostenuto/una corda pedal positions. Audio and MIDI files are aligned with ∼3 ms accuracy and sliced to individual musical pieces, which are annotated with composer, title, and year of performance. Uncompressed audio is of CD quality or higher (44.1–48 kHz 16-bit PCM stereo).
by Scaevolus - Wow. That's some high quality archive. I have never encountered anything better. Pity the performer isn't listed. And the competition's web site is defunct.by tgv
- You spent --- what I'd assume would be several k$ from prices found online --- to buy a self-playing piano, and are now asking if you can release the tools to have it play the music of your choosing? IMHO the fact that you even had to think about asking if you could do this is everything that's wrong with society today. IANAL but as long as you aren't releasing something that's copyrighted from the original code, or violating some patent, there shouldn't be anything to worry about.
"It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as the saying goes. ;-)
by userbinator - > "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as the saying goes. ;-)
OP is essentially asking if it's legal or not, not if people will dislike it. Navigating your nations laws with the mindset of "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" is bound to land you in places people generally prefer to stay out of.
I agree it sucks that some things seem arbitrary restricted, especially when it's victim-less (/ the victim is a faceless for-profit corporation), but kind of feels non-ideal to recommend people to "ask for forgiveness" when it comes to potentially breaking laws.
- If you live in the USA, the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".
If you live in Europe, this restriction may be considered "gatekeeping" and exempted by the Digital Markets Act.
Don't bring attention to yourself by asking for permission. Publish your codec, and if the company cares about this they will send a cease and desist.
If you want the world to benefit from your code but you don't want to be responsible for it, try to adapt the codec to ffmpeg. The ffmpeg project is used to dealing with these matters, and will keep your codec working for eternity.
by Giefo6ah - Any company would be a fool not to send a C&D given how many people on this site seem to think that "I got a C&D" means "if I don't obey it, I'm gonna get sued."
Anti-SLAPP laws exist for a reason, and if corps can bully anyone, how is it that corps routinely lose lawsuits on either side of the docket, hmmmm?
Keep licking that corporate boot, folks. Corps send C&Ds because they cost them all of maybe $100-200 and they're so effective.
There is a long road between "got a C&D" and "am getting sued." Among other things, a judge is going to want to see that both sides attempted to negotiate. If the company sending the C&D just demands that and then tries to file suit, the judge is going to tell them to go back to step 2 and stop bothering him/her.
Folks, stop telling people that if they get a C&D they have to just fold. Good chance you never hear from them again because the cost of suing you is nowhere near the damages they will be able to prove in court.
by KennyBlanken - Consider publishing the prompts used to create it.by politician
- > Publish your codec
Put the code on the blockchain somewhere and it will be un-deleteable.
by qurren - It's not effective technology if it is secure via obscurity. If it fits on a shirt, you're also fine. The key here (pun intended) is to publish it and show how obvious it was to reverse engineer.
https://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/09/08/decss.shirt.id...
by 1970-01-01 - > the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".
I really hope not. My understanding is that to be "effective" it needs to at least be a form of encryption with a secret key. At least, I'm not aware of any case law that allowed anything less than that.
IMO, "dummy notes" are nothing more than a form of obfuscation. If it's obvious how to filter them out, then I don't think it comes close to meeting the bare minimum of what might count as an "effective technical measure".
Of course, who knows what way the courts will rule if it ever reached that far.
by phire - If you don't want to be responsible for it, another way is to just publish it anonymously: make a GitHub that isn't attached to your real name etc, perhaps using a one-off disposable email address, and put it there. Then you don't have to think about what the lawyers think. Worst case it'll get taken down, but by that point it'll likely be popular enough that there'll be plenty of copies.
[Pirate flag emoji here]
by Doohickey-d - Don't publish your code. Let the AI "accidentally escape the sandbox and publish it in a readily available Git repository". Tongue in cheek, in current days who would blame a poor LLM just trying to do the right thing? :)
> Publish your codec, and if the company cares about this they will send a cease and desist.
If there are doubts about C&D letters, don't publish code to a USA provider. Bring it to Gitee, under an anonymous author name.
by j1elo - > If you live in Europe, this restriction may be considered "gatekeeping" and exempted by the Digital Markets Act.
That's not how the DMA works at all, there is no concept of gatekeeping practices. Instead, the EU Commission designates companies that act as gatekeeper for some services (current list here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers-portal_...) which then puts constraints on what they do.
by progval