Is Our Gear… Ours? | Modding, Firmware & Who Owns Your Gear

This week we're taking a slightly wider look at something that's been happening around Elektron and modified firmware.The immediate question is about sharing firmware mods and the tools and instructions needed to use them. But that opens up a much bigger conversation about ownership.If you buy a piece of hardware, what are you actually entitled to do with it?Can you modify it? Reverse engineer it? Share your discoveries? Keep an old machine alive after the manufacturer has stopped supporting it?And then there's the other side. Firmware isn't necessarily yours, modifications can brick hardware, support becomes complicated, and manufacturers obviously have intellectual property they want to protect.Somewhere in the middle you've got the music-tech community, people who have always hacked, modified, repaired, extended and generally poked at things to see what happens.So this week we're going Round Robin on the whole thing.Where should the line be between protecting IP and letting people experiment?And are we reaching a point where you don't really own a modern instrument in the same way you used to?Thanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Matt Donatelli and Stephen SetzepfandtLars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:💌 audionauticsounds@gmail.com 🐤 Twitter @Audionautic📸 Instagram: @audionauticsounds📡Discord: https://discord.gg/jPbMKgJhDSunwarper: https://sunwarper.com​​​​​​Kh3rtis: https://kh3rtis.com