Re:Firmware (Score 1)

Upgradinging of the firmware, totally legal? Ackk. You can do whatever you want with your CD-R drive and it would be totally legal- you have first sale rights. I will be scared if we live in a country where people even have to wonder if modifying their own hardware is "totally legal" or not.

Don't count on it. The hardware itself isn't protected by copyright law, and you can rearrange circuitry and tweak resistors all you want. Firmware code, however, is software (installed on the chips of the drive) and is probably licensed just like all other software, under a contract that supplants the user's first sale rights. I'm willing to bet that at least some of those companies have click-through licenses telling you what drives you can and can't install the firmware on.

I haven't investigated the sites mentioned in the post, as I'm completely satisfied with my CD-RW. But if that firmware is distributed under a restrictive license, the submitting AC's "totally legal" is totally false. Check the licenses.

As a practical matter, I doubt there's a way they can tell. But the fact that it'd be awfully hard to get caught doesn't make it legal.

On a non-legal note, it strikes me as a little economically weird for hardware companies to try to fool with firmware and equipment prices this way. If the drives indeed all use identical equipment, why not just sell them all as high-speed drives for an average price, underpricing the competition on the high-speed drives? Is this a form of price discrimination? On the other hand, maybe there are slight differences in the equipment (in which case it might be described as "overclocking" rather than a mere "firmware update"), suggesting that updaters risk burning something out.

That's more than enough thoughts for one post.