Will Third Party Firmware Void Your Canon Warranty?

[Marsu42]

Fyi: From everything I read on the Magic Lantern forum, Canon service doesn't even care if you have managed to brick your camera and have even left the sd card with ml in the camera - obviously it's not worth the hassle to argue with the customer to them.

But of course ymmv, even though ml can be uninstalled at any time w/o any trace of it ever been there.

 

[infared]

Can anyone tell me if they know of any 5DMark III's "Bricking" (which I assume means freezing up and becoming non-responsive? ...if I am wrong about that term...please inform me)??????
I only shoot still and think that the 5DIII is one incredible camera...so I do not have a strong desire to install ML on my camera unless in the final version there are some truly compelling features for still shooters.

 

[dgatwood]

From a legal perspective, nothing can ever "void" the warranty on a product per se. However, this seems to be a commonly stated issue for many products. For example, car dealerships often tell customers that if they don't perform the standard service work their warranty will be voided. Absolutely untrue. The warranty is a legal contract and can not be voided. What is true, is that if damage is caused by user negligence the manufacturer can refuse to cover said damage. So, continuing the car example, if you don't change your oil and the engine seizes because the oil has turned to equal parts syrup and sludge, they can refuse to cover the repair.

Correct. And more to the point, if the door falls off or the transmission dies, they still have to cover those repairs.

As for Canon threatening legal action only for firmware hacks on a 1-series but not on other bodies that seems strange. I seriously doubt that's their official position. If ML is not supporting 1-series bodies it is far more likely that they just didn't want to put the work into writing code for 1-series bodies when for video the 5D2/3 is the much bigger market.

There's probably a fairly trivial way to modify the older 1-series cameras to do 4K video, but the extra heat would cause a high device failure rate because of the lack of a larger heat sink found in the later versions. So I could see that particular hack leading to legal action, if only because Canon's only choices would be to refuse warranty service or eat the significant repair costs.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I think Canon should put more effort and deal with more brain and optimize firmware for 1D series instead of pursuing one who could actualy make better software.
They think that we, users are idiots.
I am very disappointed with the fact that I payed for 6.000,00 $ camera that has a "less power" in video quality than 5 year old 50d that cost 350$ and with ML hack becomes raw video monster.
I feel like spaceball... quote: "Wait, what happened, where are they??? I don't know sir, they must have hiper jets out there! And what do we have on this thing??? Cuisinart ??? No sir... (we have 1Dx) ;D Well, find them, catch them... end of quote.
So Canon, what do you say? What do we have in here? How will we catch 50D, or 5DMarkII, or 5DMarkIII... they must have raw video, and what do we have ???
I suppose that we 1Dx owners are 6.000,00$ succers !!!
Good job Canon... nicely done...

So you think that 50 frames of video with no audio is monster performance? Or 250 or 300 frames at lower resolution? The 50D hack is a stunt but no one is going to film a movie using it 50 frames at a time.

Doesn't your 1D X do what you bought it for? If not, you should have returned it. New cameras with new capabilities are going to keep coming out, and ML is going to hack older bodies even if they are not practical to actually use.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

Yeah, and Ford is going to sue Fiesta owners for fitting Regal tyres. Honestly, what's next ... the threat of legal action for the use of non-Canon lenses, unauthorised brands of CF cards and/or not "upgrading" within six months of the "replacement" model being announced.

Your analogy is fairly flawed. A more fitting car analogy would be Ford suing Fiesta owners for altering the software in the car's ECU.

The issue here isn't the users — Canon will never sue the users. The issue is with the developers of Magic Lantern. You enter some very tricky ground when you start reverse-engineering proprietary products that're covered by intellectual property laws. If you can prove that you've done a completely black-box reverse engineer (i.e., you did it completely on your own by observing the product(s) you have) then you're legally protected from lawsuits.

However, if there's even a whiff of some inside information being used - be it a confidential informant from inside the company or unearthing some leaked document and using the information therein, you get into very hot water very quickly.

I imagine Canon are happy to let things slide a bit for "lesser" cameras and Magic Lantern etc. However, if their stance on the EOS-1 is indeed what this thread is discussing, Canon's legal team will be looking for any possible way they can put pressure on the developers of Magic Lantern.

To be honest, I don't blame Magic Lantern's development team for keeping away from them. Sure, this all may just be smoke and mirrors from Canon, but from their point of view, it's not worth it. Someone posts a tip on their forum that helps development which later turns out to have been from an internal document? Bam - lawsuit.

They are ot reverse egieerig the firware ad ruig a ew oe they are just hookig i ew code o the ouside. Whe usig L th

ahh da i guess 'fiig' y keyoard failed ahh dar

OK now, well what I meant to say, and now can that I got a new keyboard, is:

They are not really reverse engineering the firmware. The camera still runs the original firmware straight from Canon. It's not a replacement version that they figured out how to write themselves. There is way too much that have no clue about with how DIGIC and the sensor works to even begin such a task. They simply load the regular firmware plus hooks and extensions that they wrote from the ground up.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

From a legal perspective, nothing can ever "void" the warranty on a product per se. However, this seems to be a commonly stated issue for many products. For example, car dealerships often tell customers that if they don't perform the standard service work their warranty will be voided. Absolutely untrue. The warranty is a legal contract and can not be voided. What is true, is that if damage is caused by user negligence the manufacturer can refuse to cover said damage. So, continuing the car example, if you don't change your oil and the engine seizes because the oil has turned to equal parts syrup and sludge, they can refuse to cover the repair.

Correct. And more to the point, if the door falls off or the transmission dies, they still have to cover those repairs.

As for Canon threatening legal action only for firmware hacks on a 1-series but not on other bodies that seems strange. I seriously doubt that's their official position. If ML is not supporting 1-series bodies it is far more likely that they just didn't want to put the work into writing code for 1-series bodies when for video the 5D2/3 is the much bigger market.

There's probably a fairly trivial way to modify the older 1-series cameras to do 4K video, but the extra heat would cause a high device failure rate because of the lack of a larger heat sink found in the later versions. So I could see that particular hack leading to legal action, if only because Canon's only choices would be to refuse warranty service or eat the significant repair costs.

I suppose switching on a module of code that had been turned off (4k and such, assuming the code actually is in the 1DX firmware, and it might not be, at least not the most recent versions of it) could be perhaps considered something like breaking copy protection and maybe on tricky ground.

If the code is not in there or if they simply, in any case, wrote their own code to drive it all (which I don't think they know enough to do) then it should be fine and Canon could say nothing about it. But the developers said they don't want to get involved without unlocking things that are clearly sold as different tiers since they said they don't think it is right (even if perhaps some thing the 1DC thing itself is wrong and foolish). Some might also be afraid that if they push too much Canon might encrpyt stuff in the future.

 

[Marsu42]

Can anyone tell me if they know of any 5DMark III's "Bricking"

The Magic Lantern devs often "brick" their test cameras, but there are ways to recover it with a special recovery firmware so most of the time a trip to Canon service is not necessary.

As a user using a final (not nightly or alpha like currently on 5d3) version it shouldn't happen, but as all software ml has bugs, thus a minimal risk remains. For me, I've been using ml for years w/o any problems on my 60d.

But generally questions might find more ml users to answer here: http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php#c3

 

[iKenndac]

They are not really reverse engineering the firmware. The camera still runs the original firmware straight from Canon. It's not a replacement version that they figured out how to write themselves. There is way too much that have no clue about with how DIGIC and the sensor works to even begin such a task. They simply load the regular firmware plus hooks and extensions that they wrote from the ground up.

Yes they are — they reverse-engineered many APIs that the firmware provides to display stuff on screen, get buttons presses, etc etc etc. They wouldn't know *how* to hook into the firmware without reverse-engineering at least some of it to figure out where to hook in.

In fact, they say the project uses reverse-engineering right in their FAQ, under the "Is It Legal?" header: "This is a clean room / black box reverse engineering effort", and again under the "Is it safe?" header: "Magic Lantern was created by reverse engineering an undocumented system that controls hardware."

 

[bluegreenturtle]

Recall that the entirety of the 1dx/1dc legal threats come from a single report here on canon rumors that CR was "told by someone" at canon that they would "bring the full weight" Canon's legal team if somebody tried to modify the 1 series. Not exactly a definitive response. In this case it's at least a bit more legit coming from the CR guy, but it's amazing how one offhanded comment on some message board or a random hyperbole from EOSHD becomes somehow fact. The DSLR video community is so incestuous.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

They are not really reverse engineering the firmware. The camera still runs the original firmware straight from Canon. It's not a replacement version that they figured out how to write themselves. There is way too much that have no clue about with how DIGIC and the sensor works to even begin such a task. They simply load the regular firmware plus hooks and extensions that they wrote from the ground up.

Yes they are — they reverse-engineered many APIs that the firmware provides to display stuff on screen, get buttons presses, etc etc etc. They wouldn't know *how* to hook into the firmware without reverse-engineering at least some of it to figure out where to hook in.

In fact, they say the project uses reverse-engineering right in their FAQ, under the "Is It Legal?" header: "This is a clean room / black box reverse engineering effort", and again under the "Is it safe?" header: "Magic Lantern was created by reverse engineering an undocumented system that controls hardware."

Yeah but come on that is in the most minimal way, obviously they have to figure out how to hook into button presses or render something to the screen if it will do anything at all. It's not like those MS-DOS clone BIOS where they reverse engineered the whole thing and none of the original BIOS code is even there at all.