What would be the legal consequence of hacking the MPC X?

If someone pulled a JJOS move and hacked both the firmware and software of the MPC X to improve basically everything that is supposedly wrong with it, what can Akai Pro do about it?

Depends what you plan on doing with it afterwards. If you're going to try to sell your hack or improved software package, you might open yourself up to potential legal issues if any of your hack includes reusing any code that was written by them. But if you're only doing it for personal use, they'd probably just void your warranty if something went wrong.

If you could do it, I'd contact Akai and ask them what they can pay you to do the improvements.
But I don't think it can be done. You'd have to either have the actual code or reverse engineer everything.

JJOS is not as easy as everyone seems to think. JJ was an employee, he had access to the source code, he STOLE the source code when he was fired. He didn't do anything magical other than keep modding work that was already done by the dev team. JJOS is never going to happen with the MPC Live.

Legally you are breaking the license so would be open to a civil lawsuit from Akai. I believe there is even the possibility of a criminal prosecution under certain american laws. As already mentioned, JJ was one of the developers on the MPC1000 so had full access to the source code. Reverse engineering an entire application like this would be impossible. I would have thought anyone with the skills to do this stuff would be targeting more profitable applications, probably by directly hacking development servers and stealing the raw source code.

IMO you can't compare it (1000 and X). I might be wrong but to me it seem that the 1000 inside parts are more proprietary while the X got the radxa board inside. It might be easier (not easy but easier than with proprietary stuff) to get code out/into it.

peace

The whole thing is a fantasy, TBH.
All that stuff would take some serious skill – and time.
Totally not feasible as a freetime hobby.
And like tutor said, if you had the skills, you'd be doing something that makes more sense or is more lucrative.

Fanu wrote:The whole thing is a fantasy, TBH.
All that stuff would take some serious skill – and time.
Totally not feasible as a freetime hobby.
And like tutor said, if you had the skills, you'd be doing something that makes more sense or is more lucrative.

Of course it would take skills and time and equipment but some people have crazy hobbies. Thinkin about the maker scene. Some people are really into reverse engineering. I mean they use all kind of techniques like acid to get rid of a chip coating and then use a microscope to 'read' it. But most of them are not that much into music gear.
https://hackaday.com/2016/12/27/extract ... id-and-uv/

peace

Scouring components to read the labels is nothing like disassembling a compiled application. There is no way you are going to get anything useful out of that without the libraries/frameworks and source code that made those finished binaries.

Fre$hBreath wrote:If someone pulled a JJOS move and hacked both the firmware and software of the MPC X to improve basically everything that is supposedly wrong with it, what can Akai Pro do about it?

I think the only chance we have is that Akai improves basically everything that is supposedly wrong with it.
But honestly, there's nothing so seriously wrong with it.
Just a midi improve would be needed.
Is it not midi a technology of 40 years ago?
I think Akai could make it work right without any JJ.

It is not really feasible to take the MPC firmware as distributed and fix things like the way it handles MIDI input, or add portamento to the sample playback. When people reverse engineer things that's not at all what it means - you can look at something like malware and try to understand what it does, or look at a filter algorithm to understand how it works to reimplement elsewhere, but this idea of taking a complex GUI app like the MPC software and adding relevant end-user features to it is just not something anyone does in any context. People do it for things like the Korg Volcas and write new firmwares for 80's poly synths, but that's orders of magnitude smaller and less complex.

What might be possible is to write a new application that runs on our MPCs and does some things better than what Akai's software does. The MPC Live/X platform is quite amenable to this, much more so than the MPC 1000 would have been, but you're writing a sampler/DAW from scratch. I have run Pure Data (without the UI) on my Live, but it'd need some serious custom patch work to integrate with the buttons/pads and be interesting.

As for the legal side, you can do whatever the hell you want to your own machine. If you patch up Akai's application and *distribute* the result, however, you're breaking their copyright like in any other case of "software piracy" and they might care about that.

Lampdog wrote:

Fre$hBreath wrote:If someone pulled a JJOS move and hacked both the firmware and software of the MPC X to improve basically everything that is supposedly wrong with it, what can Akai Pro do about it?

Are you really asking this question, as if you have no clue of the legal ramifications?

It’s a valid question, actually. People were hacking their iPhones a decade ago.

If he backwards engineered his MPC-X for personal use, he could do whatever the hell he wanted to do with it for his own personal use - as he owns it. But the moment he shares it on the Internet - either for free or sale - then yeah, then and only then is he opening himself up to legal trouble.

^^^^^ l agree, for his personal modifications there is nothing Akai could do, how would they know?

The moment he tries to do BUSINESS with their machine to modify it for a gain, intellectual properties and infringement is a mofo to deal with. I've wirked in law for 12 years, entertainment was my specialty.

Many things can be understood by using them, not by having the code. Is my opinion. No need to think about legal consequences for many years, for one person to finish something like this. And maybe just think of getting a job at AKAI then? Having nice thoughts.