> But as someone who's a big fan of your work, I'd implore you to not trust myself or your knowledge on this and hit up a lawyer. You're close enough to the edge of legality with a lot of your work that I'd hate to see you stifled by a minor misunderstanding here that could have been avoided.
I do not retain a lawyer personally, but I inform myself of legal opinions around this field. It's why I felt comfortable enough to write this:
Ultimately though, once you stay clear of obviously problematic actions, the question of whether you're going to get in trouble boils down to whether the company you're up against is evil, for better or for worse. Given that Apple isn't going around suing jailbreakers and Hackintoshers, I'm not too worried that they'll go after us as long as we don't do anything stupid.
Conversely, I got frivolously sued by Sony for talking about a security vulnerability in the PS3... and yeah, I had to get a lawyer for that one.
In the end, once you get yourself deep enough into legal analysis around these subjects, you come to the conclusion that everyone violates copyright in little ways, all the time, and the world would grind to a halt if we stopped. The system is broken and relies on the goodwill of the people participating to not completely collapse. For example, I've previously mentioned how copying most example code you find online, e.g. in places like Stack Overflow, is a copyright violation unless you adhere strictly to the license (did you know SO content is licensed under CC-BY-SA?). Posting third party code snippets to most services, e.g. Twitter, is a copyright violation due to incompatibility between the license and the ToS requirements of the site. And so on.
I do not retain a lawyer personally, but I inform myself of legal opinions around this field. It's why I felt comfortable enough to write this:
https://asahilinux.org/copyright/
Ultimately though, once you stay clear of obviously problematic actions, the question of whether you're going to get in trouble boils down to whether the company you're up against is evil, for better or for worse. Given that Apple isn't going around suing jailbreakers and Hackintoshers, I'm not too worried that they'll go after us as long as we don't do anything stupid.
Conversely, I got frivolously sued by Sony for talking about a security vulnerability in the PS3... and yeah, I had to get a lawyer for that one.
In the end, once you get yourself deep enough into legal analysis around these subjects, you come to the conclusion that everyone violates copyright in little ways, all the time, and the world would grind to a halt if we stopped. The system is broken and relies on the goodwill of the people participating to not completely collapse. For example, I've previously mentioned how copying most example code you find online, e.g. in places like Stack Overflow, is a copyright violation unless you adhere strictly to the license (did you know SO content is licensed under CC-BY-SA?). Posting third party code snippets to most services, e.g. Twitter, is a copyright violation due to incompatibility between the license and the ToS requirements of the site. And so on.