Quoted below is Tom's reply to the DMCA take-down notice that Texas Instruments sent:

Mr. Foster,

This afternoon I received an email from you, attached below, which orders me to remove a post from my blog at www.memestreams.net about the cracking of the TI-83 OS Signing Key. Upon receiving your email I removed the post you reference from MemeStreams. However, I do not think that the post you referenced on MemeStreams violates Texas Instruments' intellectual property. Your email does not make clear what aspect of my post you object to, and because it was so vague I suspect you may have emailed me without taking the time to properly digest the context and purpose of my post.

I am a professional computer security researcher. My personal blog on MemeStreams is a place were I regularly comment on matters relevant to computer security in both the technical and policy realm. The purpose of my post about the TI-83 signing key was to report the fact that the key had been cracked, to explain why I felt that event was important and unprecedented, to discuss the implications of that event for the practice of computer security, and to consider potential events that might follow in the future.

Absolutely nothing about my post was intended to encourage or facilitate the violation of Texas Instrument's Intellectual Property. I did not include specific information, such as the numeric keys, which might have facilitated that. Frankly, I don't care about calculator operating systems and neither does anyone else who reads my blog. My interest in the subject is purely academic - its about the implications that this event has for the greater practice of computer security.

I did provide hyperlinks to the forums where the crack was discussed, but I did so only because those are the primary sources that demonstrate that the event that I was reporting on did, in fact, actually happen. While the DMCA has been used to prohibit people from providing hyperlinks in the past, this has only been done in the context where the purpose of providing those hyperlinks was to facilitate infringement. Nothing about my post encourages infringement. In my case the purpose of providing the links was to accurately report the news.

I have a constitutional right to report the news. I have a right to report that this event occurred, to explain what web forums it occurred in, and explain what implications I think it has. This is no different from a newspaper reporting that a murder occurred, reporting what street it occurred on, and explaining why their readers should care. The DMCA does not curtail these fundamental constitutional rights.

I sympathize with your position Mr. Foster. In fact, the post you asked me to remove predicted that Texas Instruments might pursue legal action against the people who are attempting to violate their intellectual property. However, I am not one of those people and I ever expected to receive a legal threat from you. As your email does not make clear what aspect of my post you object to, I've been forced to remove the post in its entirety. I feel this is a significant trespass upon my First Amendment rights and I presume that it could only have happened in error.

Please take a moment to carefully reconsider the position you've taken here.

Thank you,
Tom Cross

TI is seriously overreaching. Their actions in regard to Tom should not be (and may not be) legal.

TI just kicked the hornet's nest.

Decius wrote:
However, I am not one of those people and I ever expected to receive a legal threat from you.

I do hope that this typo didn't make its way out to the lawyer. :)

Simon C. Ion wrote:

Decius wrote:
However, I am not one of those people and I ever expected to receive a legal threat from you.

I do hope that this typo didn't make its way out to the lawyer. :)

Perhaps it did, but I think its pretty obvious that I meant to say "never."

Decius wrote:

Simon C. Ion wrote:

Decius wrote:
However, I am not one of those people and I ever expected to receive a legal threat from you.

I do hope that this typo didn't make its way out to the lawyer. :)

Perhaps it did, but I think its pretty obvious that I meant to say "never."

It was obvious, but you never know, they might take it that the DMCA gives them the right to arrest you for circumventing the English language.

I think it is important to correct an error I made in my response to Texas Instruments' DMCA takedown order. I wrote:

I did not include specific information, such as the numeric keys, which might have facilitated [the violation of Texas Instruments' Intellectual Property.]

Then later:

I sympathize with your position Mr. Foster. In fact, the post you asked me to remove predicted that Texas Instruments might pursue legal action against the people who are attempting to violate their intellectual property. However, I am not one of those people and I ever expected to receive a legal threat from you.

Although I did not include the numeric keys in my post, I would not have been facilitating the violation of TI's IP even if I had done so. I think that Jennifer Granick has made a clear and correct case in her blog post about this controversy that Texas Instruments does not have a legitimate intellectual property interest in those keys.

The keys are not intended to protect TI's copyrights, they are intended to prevent interoperability with TI's hardware. The DMCA provides a exemption for reverse engineering to achieve interoperability. This exemption was specifically intended to prevent companies from making the sort of claims that TI has made in this instance.

In order to have a competitive and innovative technology marketplace its important that we protect the right of third parties to built unauthorized interoperable software. The alternative would see bogus claims of "copyright infringement" used to prevent third parties from building technology that supports even the most trivial protocols and interfaces. Myriad powerful peripherals, systems, and software would be eliminated from the marketplace.

The bottom line is that TI is using claims of copyright infringement in a context that has absolutely nothing to do with copyright, and they are wrong to do so.