They didn't give anything to you, they only sold a licence to use it. You should be able to do anything reasonable with the things you have licenced but not the things you haven't licenced. In particular there should, of course, be a secondhand market in selling such licences, and the EU is attempting to enforce that concept.
If they sold me a license, then there must have been some point at which I agreed to that license. At what point did I agree to such a thing when I purchased my piece of test gear? Nothing appeared on the screen indicating any such thing.
Let's get something out of the way: firstly, do you agree that manufacturers are free to implement features however they want, and are perfectly free to implement them in such a way that they cannot be "hacked" if they so desired?
Secondly, do you agree that if something is in your lawful possession, that you should be able to do anything you want with it (excluding obvious things, of course, like intentionally using it to harm someone else)?
Which is to say,
do you believe the market should be free?A free market depends on freedom of the players involved. The sellers have to be free to build what they want in whatever way they want. The buyers have to be free to buy what they want and do what they want with it once they have it. Both entities have to be free to enter into binding agreements with each other as to who will do what. And buyers and sellers both have to be free to do whatever they wish, absent the restrictions they agree to. There are some basic limitations on that (e.g., warranties, right of return, etc. And yes, even copyright. See below) which have been imposed for the purpose of general improvement of the market, but aside from those things, markets are generally free. Is that something you have a problem with?
In the United States, at least, copyright law exists for one reason only:
to promote the progress of the sciences and the useful arts. This is the explicitly stated purpose in the United States Constitution for which the power to impose copyright laws was
granted to Congress, and the reason copyrights have term limits in the United States is because the Constitution explicitly states that the terms are to be limited. Keep this in mind when you make claims about software copyright and its purpose.
Sellers generally have the right to build their products however they want. But implicit in that liberty is the recognition that they must also bear the
cost of doing so. Obviously, that cost will be reflected in their prices. Similarly, buyers are free to do whatever they want with the products they purchase, but implicit in that is the recognition that sellers might take steps to limit that through various means.
How does all this relate to "hacking" DSOs? Simple: "hacking" the DSO is simply an action that the purchaser is physically able to take. There isn't anything that physically constrains the purchaser from doing so. Copyright law does not forbid the purchaser from doing so, either, at least with respect to the "unlock codes" we're talking about. The DMCA covers mechanisms that prevent "access to a work protected under this title", but as applied to software, that "access" is with respect to the
code, not the
features implemented by that code. This interpretation makes sense because copyright protects against
unauthorized copies. It does not govern
use, at least in the United States, thanks to the exemption in
17 U.S.C. 117. If use of the software/firmware during normal operation were covered by copyright law, then
a license agreement would be necessary in order to legally use any computing device at all, including special purpose ones such as oscilloscopes.
So: at least as regards United States law, it appears that "hacking" these scopes is perfectly legal, at least if we're talking about the type that involves entering an unlock key. But, of course, manufacturers are free to implement measures that protect against that. The kind of hacking that some refer to here (decrypting the code in the ROMs, for instance) is illegal per copyright law, as that
does involve making copies. But entering a magic key that unlocks a feature is not.
A manufacturer who is concerned about the kind of unlocking that we're primarily discussing here can
easily implement a system that would make it impossible for the end user to determine what key he should enter into the scope to unlock a feature. The manufacturer need only cryptographically sign with its private key a packet that contains both the feature descriptor and the scope's serial number, generating a blob that contains the signature and the feature descriptor. Uploading the resulting blob to the scope would cause the scope to store the blob in its database. The bootloader would have on file the public key of the manufacturer. When the scope boots, the bootloader would go through the signed blobs and activate the features for which it is able to cryptographically verify the signature.
In light of the ease with which manufacturers can make unlocking features impossible without their explicit permission, and do so on a per-device basis, the ones that fail to do so anyway clearly are
intentionally making it possible to "hack" their scopes. That is a business decision on their part, just like purchasing the scope is a business decision on the part of the buyer. If the scope can be "hacked" in that fashion, and the manufacturer fails to take steps to prevent it, who are we to say that "hacking" it is "wrong", when it's clear that the manufacturer clearly
prefers that their scopes be "hackable"?
No, in this case, if someone has reservations about "hacking" these scopes, that's on them and them alone.