> If you can find someone to write it, because these aren't a product that is generally available.

Trade credit insurance etc. are generally available. The general concept is that you want to insure against your counterparty being unable to fulfill their obligations, which is exactly the concern here, and nothing stops you from requiring them to pay for that and then naming a trust as the beneficiary that would use the money to uphold their obligation to continue to support the device, if you really want to do that.

> Nobody would do this, because funding a requirement that wouldn't ever be enforceable is akin to burning money. You can't penalize a company that doesn't exist.

The money comes from the insurance that pays out because they defaulted. The insurance company still exists and is required to pay the claim.

> It absolutely is, and it's why precisely zero phones (even 'open source' phones) have an open baseband.

This doesn't make any sense. Can you cite the specific statute or regulation that requires this?

What secret is even being protected here? Surely the method of operation for baseband modems is not classified information.

> No. Regulations require companies to ensure they design their products to operate within regulatory requirements.

The devices presumably do operate within regulatory requirements as manufactured. It's ridiculous to expect the manufacturer to prevent the customer from modifying the device. If someone modifies the device it's on them. How is the OEM supposed to stop someone from splicing a signal amplifier into the antenna or having a device from a different regulatory domain drop shipped or similar?

> Leaks, by definition, are not intentional.

Once the code is leaked, intentionally or otherwise, you're now intentionally selling a device with publicly available code. Why should the response to that be any different than selling a device for which the code was intentionally published to comply with the laws of another jurisdiction?

> No, they really shouldn't. There are good reasons that mass market devices are designed not to interfere with other users of the spectrum.

They would still be designed to do that. The difference is that you put the obligation for prosecuting users who modify devices to violate those regulations where it belongs, on law enforcement, instead of compromising security, freedom and transparency by trying to put it on device OEMs.

> Are you suggesting that parties other than OEMs are subject to this law too??? Good lord -- do you want the corner gas station to hire engineers to ensure the microcontroller firmware on the phone chargers they sell is properly open sourced? Basically all other product regulatory law affects the company that makes the product, for good reason.

What do you think currently happens if you go to Walmart and buy a product manufactured in China with faulty wiring and it starts a fire? Or a foreign-made wireless access point that exceeds FCC regulatory limits on transmit power out of the box?

> The rights legally exist regardless, and the reason I used this example is because it is a very solid way to go after people who steal private works.

It's basically a hack the courts used because there wasn't a more convenient existing law to go after people who do that but those people are unsympathetic. It's ancillary to the core purpose of copyright laws.

> And there are other various durations which apply when the work is not published. Publishing is not a requirement.

The other durations are longer (e.g. 120 years from creation vs. 95 years from publication), so for for the vast majority of works which are promptly published it's the publication date that causes expiration. The other date exists only to ensure that the work can't be withheld from the public domain indefinitely by not publishing it, which is back to the purpose of copyright being to enrich the public domain.

> Yep, that's the clause that enumerated the power of the federal government to regulate those things. Which the federal government subsequently, as that clause granted them the power to do, regulated them as two entirely separate categories of intellectual property.

The constitution itself implies that they're two different things, but the point is that they have the same ultimate purpose and denying the public the source code frustrates that purpose, so it's entirely reasonable to require it in exchange for the benefits of copyright protection.