You publish it as the organ-guy piano system for a virtual piano that you've lost the code for.
On a serious note: reverse engineering is legal in australia, even for DMCA violations.
Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
21–30 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#22You 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 wherew…
I might just email the company. If they object, I won't make my GitHub repo public.
Have you ever worked corporate before?
It is better to ask forgiveness than permission.
Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#23Find someone in Europe or Australia, or some other place with non-insane digital laws, and have that person publish it as the “developer.”
Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#24You bought a hardware device and you own that device?
This decoy notes scheme seems pretty unethical.
Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#25You publish it as the organ-guy piano system for a virtual piano that you've lost the code for. On a serious note: reverse engineering is legal in australia, even for DMCA violations.
Would love for sources / prior case law around this? I'm Australian and involved in reverse engineering insulin pumps and CGMs, and we are constantly worried about getting our butts DMCA'd.
Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#26If I ever owned a self-playing piano, figuring out how I could play custom songs of my own creation would be my top priority. It’s awesome you’ve found some success. Jmpman, what your post is missing is motivation. Why are you doing this and what is your goal?
If you sell your decoder or encoder the company will, eventually, kick your butt. Getting money involved raises the stakes.
If you distribute a file that is sold by the company, even if it was transformed by a decoder, the company will, eventually, kick your butt. (A recording or sample of how it sounds post-transformation for demonstration purposes would be reasonable.)
If your software requires files that must be paid for in order to function, then it’s critical that you do not bundle those files with your decoder or encoder. That would be piracy.
How your software was made matters. Did you have access to non-public information about anything involved? It seems like the answer is no, so you might be fine. It sounds like you legally obtained a copy of the file, hardware that runs it, and figured out how they work.
What terms of service did you agree to? While not everything listed may hold up in court (which gets determined BY a court IN a court so don’t think that’s an easy win), the company is surely within their rights to ban you from their online service.
If you want some relevant legal advice, check out the GameCube Dolphin emulator and how the team stays legal. I love learning about how stuff works, so I’ve followed lots of console jailbreaking and reverse engineering news for years. There is a way to do this stuff legally. HN is focused more on finance than hacking. So talk to some hackers (who aren’t trying to break the law).
I saw you ask about contacting the company. If this was a blog, I’d love a followup about what they say and do, but alas I’ll probably never see it. (I guess the worst outcome is that they spend more money on making their proprietary stuff more locked down?) Regardless of what they say, their word is not the law. Know the law, know your rights, and know when it’s safe to stick your neck out and when it’s not. I am obviously not a lawyer.
Oh, and which US state you are in and what they are based in will be relevant.
Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#27If 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 wo…
> 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.
Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#28my experience with LLMs is that when you get answers to questions you didn't ask that it's repeating something that already exists. In other words, it probably regenerated a tool from which it was trained on.
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Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#29If 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 wo…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
#30If 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 wo…
> 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.