Consequently, if you steal into my house and don't attempt to abscond with anything or hurt anyone, I might get into serious trouble, make-my-day law or no, for shooting you. That would, likely be the outcome nevertheless.

However, if you defeat the protection on my 805x in order to examine the code within, while I may consider you a thief for stealing my privacy and right to be secure in my own home, the judge interpreting the law may not agree with me. Some judges would require that I have irrefutable evidence that you intended to cause harm to me or to damage/steal property. If you're already dead, you can't lie about your intentions.

Stealing code is another issue altogether, though, isn't it? If you steal, i.e. misappropriate by copying, my code, I still have it, and, in fact, can, only with great difficulty, prove that you did that. If you look at the license agreements that come with most software packages and, indeed, with the bulk of hardware that includes drivers and utilities, I think you'll find there are terms that deny you the right to inspect what you can't see in that product, particularly for the purpose of altering or reverse-engineering it. It may be yours, but the right to tamper with it is not. The reason is that, once you start to tamper with the device, you're tampering with the designer and/or manufacturer's intellectual property. If you do that having agreed in any form with the license agreement, you're potentially subject to a massive lawsuit.

RE