NEC v. Intel was an important case in deciding the legal status of firmware copyright protection and of reverse engineering. I think it was decided in 1989. It was about NEC's firmware for its version of the 386; NEC brought suit to stop Intel from saying that NEC had violated copyright. The judge's opinion was medium long, but was very well written, accessible, and even entertaining in parts, so I read the whole thing. He had 4 findings of fact, I think, of which I only remember the first 3. Paraphrasing, they were:

1. Is firmware a fit subject for copyright. (Yes).
2. Did NEC copy Intel's firmware. (No.)
3. Did Intel fail to adequately protect it's copyright.(Yes.)

It's the third that I'm working from. Intel had farmed out some of it's manufacturing of chips. One of the fab facilities had failed to put the copyright stamp on their chips. Intel had let it go, only sending them letters insisting they do this when the NEC v. Intel case was getting set up to go to trial. The Intel side argued precedent from a handicrafts case in which copyright notice had been omitted from a "small number" of items, and the earlier judge had said that was OK. The judge in NEC v. Intel said that although Intel had argued that the percentage of chips without a copyright (I think it was 0.6%) was small, he was not able to see over 6 million chips as "a small number" and therefore Intel had indeed failed to protect its copyright.

The other source was from theater. I wanted to do a highschool performance of Hal Holbrook's collection of Mark Twain material to about 80 people. I thought Hal Holbrook would be supportive. He might even feel flattered, but I wanted to check with him before hand. I asked an older actress friend of our familly if she new how to get in touch with him. Yes she did, knew his agent too, but she recommended against contacting him, since there was almost no possibility of getting permission. She said Hal Holbrook would be obligated by contract to refer such a question to his agent, and his agent would have to say no, to protect Hal Holbrook's future rights to the material, even though the audience was small and he would want to say yes to support something which could be seen as a tribute and was cerainly no competition. She said I could do the performance and they could overlook it without compromising future ownership of the material.(I never did perform, or ask.)

Those are the two things I've been working from. Now that I've got input from you and chromatic pointing in the other direction, I'll keep my ears open.