I agree with having copyright and don't believe that all software should be free but there's a very big difference between hardware and software, especially when scale is concerned.. It is true that both software cost money in non-recurring engineering costs. The difference is how the cost reduces vs the number of units produced: as the number of units rises towards infinity, the cost of the hardware reaches the lower limit of the cost of the raw materials, energy, labour, transport etc. but with software, the cost per unit falls towards zero. I feel that this point is often neglected, when people think about software vs hardware.
This is all true. This is exactly why it's critical to point out that copyright is
not being violated by entering any of these magic codes into these scopes. Because there is no copying of copyrighted material going on, nor violation of the DMCA, there is no violation of law (at least in the U.S. -- other jurisdictions may have laws that would prohibit these things). More importantly, there is no compromise of the value of the code by way of the creation of additional copies of it, because no additional copies are being created in the first place.
Copyright's purpose is to make it possible for creators of copyrightable works to impose artificial scarcity of the works themselves, thereby causing their works to be subject to the normal laws of supply and demand. That is the
only legitimate purpose it has. Anything beyond that is an unjustifiable restraint upon the free market, and amounts to a claim that creators of copyrightable works are somehow
more special than anyone else who creates things, and that results in higher prices and a less efficient market for all. Because copyright law goes beyond mere prevention of unauthorized distribution of copies, a less efficient market with higher prices is exactly what we've gotten in a number of cases. That is exactly what occurred with Microsoft -- they leveraged copyright law to impose themselves into the operating system market in such a way that other entities could not reasonably compete with them, even when those entities released their products for free (note how Linux, to name but one example,
still does not come close to Microsoft in terms of adoption on the desktop).