&gt; And even when said premise is correct for a device, there are cases where the firmware inherently requires copyrighted material (For instance, requiring a (copyrighted) poem in a handshake).<p>No way! Copyright law does not prevent someone from creating a new work that is designed to be compatible with an old work. Likely outcomes are that the poem would not qualify for copyright protection for that usage (it&#x27;s not a poem as much as a sequence of arbitrary bytes to be read only by a computer), or that a fair use finding would be made, perhaps on the grounds that the copy does not affect the market for the original work - i.e. nobody was paying for the <i>poem</i>. Most likely a judge would just throw out the entire case at the start as a waste of the court&#x27;s time.