Be sure to check out Julian's article over at Ars on the fight between DISH Network and Freetech, makers of a satellite receiver box that, with a custom firmware, can be made to receive DISH Network's satellite programming without a subscription.

I'll just add that the situation is very similar to the one that's faced the console modchip industry for years. Modchips, which alter the behavior of videogame consoles, are typically sold with a firmware that only makes legal functionality possible — running Linux on the unit, that sort of thing. The vast majority, though, are then reflashed by their owners with custom firmwares that enable piracy and other illegal operations. Because it's much easier to distribute illegal software without getting caught than it is to distribute illegal physical objects, this provides a sneaky way of shipping around proscribed devices. The DMCA is in part an attempt to fight this tactic, but it necessarily gets into the murky area surrounding what an object — one that has some legitimate uses — is intended to do.

The problem's likely to get worse, incidentally. A consequence of ever-improving chip performance and ever-falling prices is that more and more device logic is placed into programmable memory rather than dedicated circuits. This confers some real benefits — it makes it easier to design the devices, for one thing, and to fix them if a bug is found. But it's relatively easy to rewrite or override that logic.

It's all pretty interesting, I think, particularly when viewed as a blurring of the lines between the physical and virtual worlds. The net's ability to facilitate the distribution of forbidden information is well-known; this is a case where one could say that forbidden objects are being transmitted. The animating spirits of the devices — the essential things that make them forbidden — have been abstracted from their physical substrates, and consequently can move around with all the speed, anonymity and reproducibility that the net has to offer.