The parts he creates, are covered by copyright, by virtue of his creating them. Unless we get into issues of whether what he does is discovery rather than creation, but then again in America, discovery is subject to IP claims - eg genetic markers themselves (discovery), rather than the specific technology of tests to identify them (creation).
The Apple logo is trademarked and copyrighted. The Apple UEFI firmware is also copyrighted. We have no idea the extent to which this guy has modified Apple's firmware code before adding it to these Nvidia cards, but there is absolutely no doubt that most of what he has done is IP theft. Why Apple permits this, yet cracked down on sales of Mac clones, is beyond me...
That would depend on how he does it - his argument would be that he's modifying a product he bought (The GPU), and reselling it - akin to buying a shovel, cutting serrations in the end, and then selling it as a "3rd party modified serrated shovel".
LOL, no. This is like if he took Acme Power Drills and modified them to work with a proprietary Craftsman charging dock that required proprietary Craftsman code to talk to the charger -- code he ripped out of Craftsman firmware updaters and modded. And then he slapped a Craftsman logo on it!
You'd have rights to your modifications as a standalone thing, and if you bought iOS devices, applied your modifications and then resold them, the first sale doctrine would AFAIK leave Apple with no actionable cause (with the proviso that your modifications couldn't be claimed to be for the purposes of enabling piracy, or defeating encryption / security etc)
Yeah, it was a bad analogy on my part, since if all you did was to modify the iOS code, but you didn't add in any code that you stole from somewhere else, then you're right, that wouldn't be a big deal. But I made a bad analogy, because he is not just modifying Nvidia's exising firmware (I'd have no problem with that)--he is adding to it a modified version of a proprietary piece of software that he did not create and has no right to be selling.
When you buy a GPU, the software on the ROM is a part of that.
When you buy a GPU, Apple's custom UEFI is not part of that. That's the whole point. If he truly wrote every line of code then OK, but that's certainly not the case here.
What MVC does, doesn't create extra copies of Nvidia's code in the wild that haven't been paid for by a customer, and for which Nvidia received revenue. That's the important distinction here,
LOL this is a complete BS argument. You cannot run Nvidia firmware on anything other than Nvidia cards, so it would not hurt Nvidia's sales if it was open source. You cannot use the firmware without having bought one of their cards in the first place, and anyone who might use the firmware has necessarily already bought a card.
If someone were to release a piece of software that modifies an Nvidia binary but requires you to get the Nvidia binary from Nvidia itself, then it would still allow the mod to be open source without any concerns about spreading around copies of Nvidia's code.
Of course, if the contents of the mod violated OTHER people's copyrights, like Apple's, that could then be an issue.
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Exactly, that's why MVCs operation doesn't attract lawsuits. His mods only happen on products that have already paid up the line to Nvidia. When people demand to be able to copy his mods and sell cards themselves, they're not paying up the line to him for the bit that he created for every single card they mod.
But he is also profiting from all the bits Apple created, and I guarantee you they didn't license him to do that, and he himself is not "paying up the line" to Apple for the bits THEY created. Hence why your argument is total hogwash.
What he's doing reminds me of those guys who sell SD cards that have firmware to allow pirated games to run on GameBoy DS. Sure, they might have created some special hack software that enables the piracy to actually work... but it's still hacking and piracy. It's not that I don't respect the time it took to hack it, but, when people make emulators to run Nintendo ROMs on Android or Mac etc., they make them open source and free. This I can respect, because they didn't invent Nintendo or the ROMs they are enabling to work, so why should they profit from what they did, which is only of interest because Nintendo made it?
I get it -- this guy wants to make some money, and he's found a way to make it worth his time to do these mods. I don't think it's all that ethical but unless someone told him to stop, then more power to him. In a sense he is doing a great service for the community, and he has to put food on his table like all of us. But don't act like it's less greazy or less grey-market than it is.
