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there are NO legal issues with writing replacement firmware for the iriver.
you aren't circumventing any copy control mechanisms, you aren't enabling access to any copy protected media. you aren't circumventing any protected access mechanisms. there isnt even any copy protection systems on the ihp-1xx. the DMCA does not apply. full stop.
the only possible issue would be if you copied iriver's firmware verbatim and just changed little bits here and there. but thats not what a replacement firmware project should do -- it should only reverse engineer the firmware enough to decode how to talk to the hardware, then write new firmware from scratch.
look, most (maybe all?) of the ihp hardware is off-the-shelf commodity hardware. there's no magical secret access codes on the hardware protected by the DMCA or any other law. you can go to the hardware vendors themselves and get the programming specs. gcc even supports a variant of the iriver cpu!
the only mystery at the moment is how all the hardware is wired together and how its addressed by the cpu. but again theres no copyrighted secrets there, it can all be legally reverse engineered by tracing the iriver firmware as it runs, then writing your own code from scratch to do the same thing.
iriver could whine all they like, but they have NO legal basis to prevent you from doing anything with the hardware that you like.
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