It’s also likely in violation of arcane copyright law. The oracle wire protocol includes a handshake procedure that sends a poem in one of the initial messages. It’s untested legal theory whether copying that poem in a new work (e.g. a new driver or compatability layer) would violate Oracle’s copyright on the poem.
Weird, Apple does a similar thing with macOS startup on Intel (and more recently, Rosetta on Linux). If the magic haiku isn’t given the OS won’t start.
Actually I’m pretty sure a lawsuit with Nintendo’s game boy drm (where you needed to have the logo in memory to boot) went to court and it was ruled that if working with the system required copying the copyrighted text then it’s fair use (US, long time ago and in a different but similar concept)
Is an encryption key copyrightable? Or a password?
Is it illegal to recite a copywrited work? Is it illegal to recite a translation of a copywrited work?
Can you copyright a number? For instance, a long binary number? If a piece of code contains a long binary number that it transmits to another device as a raw number, does it matter if the other device can arbitrarily interpret that number as a copyrighted work using SJIS or ASCII or some tortured encoding created just to turn a specific number into a specific copyrighted work? If the number was stored in UTF8 so that each 1 was encoded as 00000001 then decoded to a 1 for transmission, can you really claim any copywrite violation?
And why does my brain waste time thinking up such questions?
