I tend to doubt the US Attorney's Office in any district will pursue an indictment against someone for obtaining a 1Mb copy of a 1997 DOS application that is meant to support a radio that is no longer made, soon no longer legal to use commercially (narrow banding) and runs on an OS (DOS) that has been dead for around two decades now. As for civil liabilities what are the damages? Is Moto going to find it financially viable to pursue that?
Yes, you are absolutely correct that nobody should be affiliating with a system they don't belong on etc....
But, my only point in ruffling people up a bit is the concept of perspective. This entire forum is based on the interception of things that if one were to take each and every jurisdiction's laws at absolute face value could be argued as unlawful. Then there are the other threads on here devoted to things such as DSD which completely copy the functionality of products by DVSI (IMBE, AMBE). Then we could move on to the open discussion of the reverse engineering of GRE's firmware. That has recently been discussed and even this forum's owner has chimed in with support and HE HAS A FINANCIAL INTEREST in his relationship with GRE but he's not freaking out because he is an intelligent individual with the ability to put it all in perspective. It's not like someone here is taking the DSD thread and cranking out Gumstix type little Linux boards to shove in radios while flipping the bird to DVSI, just as the guy asking to program his Spectra is not vacuuming up all the work for starving MRSS employees all over the place.
My amazement is the fact that the magical word Moto or RSS gets uttered and some are ready to wage holy war in the name of mother M. I don't want to see that same level of outrage for every other topic I mentioned but why is it that big M gets this fanatical following? I saw this happen for years over at Batlabs to the point that it completely stifled all productive discussion because there was no reasonable discretion. It was a totally freak out response which drove away new people and good portion of the old timers. I just don't want to see that happen here with something as innocent as the discussion of where within the massive universe of the web a guy can find a crappy copy of some spectra RSS.