Texas Instruments Goes Legal On Calculator Hackers: How Dare You Make Our Product Better!

from the seriously? dept

I have to admit that I cannot remember where (perhaps it was in the comments on Techdirt?), but I recently saw a discussion among a few people discussing how odd it is that computers and mobile phones have advanced so much... but scientific calculators still are nearly identical as to what they were decades ago. The state of the art seems to have frozen somewhere in the 1980s. Perhaps it's because Texas Instruments, one of the major calulator makers out there, goes around threatening people who hack their calculators to run additional software on them. Apparently, the company is sending DMCA takedown notices to people who have posted code for running other software on their TI calculators. This is clearly against what the DMCA was designed to do, but is a consequence of the overly broad (and, frankly, ridiculous) anti-circumvention clause found in the DMCA.

This is a perfect example of how the DMCA is used by companies to prevent innovation, not to stop copying. Notice that there is no "copying" of any TI software going on here. It's just that in being able to run this software, apparently you need to bypass some protection measures that TI installed. Thus, TI claims, it's a circumvention and a violation of the DMCA. Of course, as the article (and various experts) note in the article, both the Copyright Office and the courts have often looked down on such blatant misuses of the DMCA, but for now the legal threats worked. The people contacted have removed the code.

Frankly, I can't fathom how this makes any sense at all for TI. Making its calculators more useful and interesting should only increase demand for the calculators. TI makes its money selling the physical product, not the software on the calculators. So what possible business rationale is there for stopping such hacking? It seems only sure to decrease the market, not increase it.

Filed Under: calculators, copyright, dmca
Companies: texas instruments