I know that service theft is a no-no to discuss, but this seems different enough that it may be OK, but I wanted to check first.
Given the hypothetical situation:
- Person has purchased a ReplayTV
- Person has paid the lifetime activation fee, and thus the hardware is activated
- ReplayTV ceases operations, thus no more guide service/myreplaytv.com
Is it OK to discuss alternatives to the ReplayTV service for ReplayTV devices? For example, if someone reverse engineered the communication protocol and built a server that the ReplayTV could connect to and be fooled into thinking that ReplayTV still existed. Of course, upgrading software would not be possible, but a guide service based on XML TV could be created. I do not mean to replace the activation service, just the guide service and potentially myreplaytv.com service.
This doesn't seem like service theft because the person has paid the activation fee, and those who only had monthly service would be out of luck at the hardware level (I think.) I'm not interested in fooling the hardware into free activation, I'm just interested in being able to use my ReplayTV in case the company stops operations.
Of course, such a service could also be used in the case that ReplayTV does an "upgrade" under order from a court to disable commercial skipping and network sharing. Using an alternative server would allow you to avoid the "upgrade", and keep using your ReplayTV as God intended. This circumvents SonicBLUE's "right to change features at any time yada yada", so that's why I want to see if this is an OK topic.
NOTE: I don't want discussion of this until one of the Powers That Be indicates this is OK to discuss either explicitly or through not deleting this thread for a while.
Given the hypothetical situation:
- Person has purchased a ReplayTV
- Person has paid the lifetime activation fee, and thus the hardware is activated
- ReplayTV ceases operations, thus no more guide service/myreplaytv.com
Is it OK to discuss alternatives to the ReplayTV service for ReplayTV devices? For example, if someone reverse engineered the communication protocol and built a server that the ReplayTV could connect to and be fooled into thinking that ReplayTV still existed. Of course, upgrading software would not be possible, but a guide service based on XML TV could be created. I do not mean to replace the activation service, just the guide service and potentially myreplaytv.com service.
This doesn't seem like service theft because the person has paid the activation fee, and those who only had monthly service would be out of luck at the hardware level (I think.) I'm not interested in fooling the hardware into free activation, I'm just interested in being able to use my ReplayTV in case the company stops operations.
Of course, such a service could also be used in the case that ReplayTV does an "upgrade" under order from a court to disable commercial skipping and network sharing. Using an alternative server would allow you to avoid the "upgrade", and keep using your ReplayTV as God intended. This circumvents SonicBLUE's "right to change features at any time yada yada", so that's why I want to see if this is an OK topic.
NOTE: I don't want discussion of this until one of the Powers That Be indicates this is OK to discuss either explicitly or through not deleting this thread for a while.
