RomRaider

I have decided to remove all image attachments and restrict future uploads indefinitely. There are a few reasons for this, I'll just go in to it very briefly.

A large amount of the ROMs that were being uploaded contained, in part or whole, changes by people who have stated they are not comfortable with their work being distributed. This is wrong. Many of us, anxious to finally tune our cars for free, got excited and either didn't care or tended to overlook this fact. I would like to personally appologize to those affected for allowing this to happen, and in a few cases maybe even facilitating it. If you would like to discuss the issue, or have suggestions, send me a private message or email.

I want to reassure everyone (or maybe make it clear for the first time to some) that this is not what the open source tuning community is all about. I've laid out a few new rules that will hopefully steer the site back in the right direction.

• All image uploads have been restricted, at least temporarily
• All posts requesting maps tuned by anyone will be deleted
• I've gone back and deleted all of the non-stock ROMs that were already uploaded. Sorry.

I'm very busy between work and school and don't have time to mess around on this issue. Please cooperate and don't make my job any harder. I'm going to take a little time and select a few more moderators to help out, as well.

If you find a professionally tuned ROM in the forums, please let me or another moderator know. Some of them may slip past and need to be removed like the rest. If you find your own personal or business work, be it ROMs or anything else, somewhere on the site and would like it removed or credited, let me or another moderator know. I am not interested in stealing or distributing your work and will gladly act upon your requests.

Finally, I'd like to appologize for the fact that this forum can't be everything some people wish it could be, and especially if I've deleted a ROM you tuned. Unfortunately, at this time, this is the only way I can ensure we keep everything legitimate. I'm already brainstorming, trying to come up with a way to do a base map section without the risk of stealing others' work.

Thank you,
jared

Not sure any of the copied or tuned ones we made we're infringing on anyone due to the fact they use the subaru ecu as a means of transportation of their product. A tune can't be copyrighted because its data could be identical to anyone else in the world coming up with the same values.

I understand that re-written logic with custom checksums and signatures should not be distributed, but there's nothing illegal about sharing our creations.

I don't quite understand the thinking behind not being able to redistribute our own modified maps? I guess you are afraid that someone will copy their tune from some other professional tuner and that professional tuner will then send you a cease & desist or worse, sue you?

The workaround I guess is to just host your images off the forum and just link to them!

I am still pondering the legality of copying maps. Are the maps covered under copyright? Physical property?

Is it also illegal to post screenshots of maps?

I don't think it matters if it is perfectly legal or not, from the perspective of someone running a free site. These companies have some big bucks and if they sue you, well, you HAVE to go to court. Of course, they'll give you an option of avoid legalities by shutting your site down. I'm sure we wouldn't want that and Jared would have little choice in the matter as I'm sure he doesn't want to hire an expensive lawyer and fight the case in court, even everything on this site was legal. As more and more people tune, we'll see more and more of these tuner's maps. And as the open source tuning community evolves, more and more people will be downloading these maps and flashing their ECUs for free with ease. The tuners with OTS maps will start feeling the pinch and probably take some action.

One solution would be to have one of the moderaters copy over, like EV8SIV3 did with the stage 2 map, only the tuning tables and no other copyright, proprietary info. But take it further - make no mention of the tuner or what stage it is - just here's a starting map for the WRX that has a VF34,pinks,TBE or here's a modified map for the stock car. I don't think there is much they can do about that. But, even if you edit out the copyright stuff but say in a post that this is "BillyBob the commercial tuner's stage 2 map", then there is evidence they can latch on to. Just as bad is partially blanking out and says "B**** B**'s map" as well all know who you are talking about.

So, maybe users could submit ROMs for review and you could have a download section like openecus' for different year cars (just a little more compact). The ROM could be checked out and made sure it doesn't have any tuner info in it and then be posted.

I don't know what I'm going to end up doing, but merchgod pretty much said it. There are currently no lawsuits. I don't want to go too much in to it, but the current buzz is that we need to be careful what we're doing.

I exchanged a couple of emails with Trey at Cobb today and they at least are being totally reasonable. You may have noticed before that they don't mind the open source community learning from what they've already done -- but this does not include blatantly distributing ROMs that were created solely for their customers. I think we can all appreciate his view. The important thing now is that we have the ability to tune our cars for free, so we don't need these OTS maps anyway. You should be able to get on a dyno and find someone to tune your car for less than $200 or so, so we're still sitting pretty good.

I don't intend to have restrict ROM uploading forever, but I need to find a reliable way to protect tuners. While we might not be breaking any laws, it's definately in our best interest to not piss off anybody with the wrong prerogatives. I don't have a dime to protect myself with and if I get shut down, we all lose. Again, though, there is no law suit. I'm just doing my best to keep it that way.

I thought about it while driving home tonight and my first though was:

If you're going to restrict any "tuned" ROM images from being posted, you really should restrict all ROM images from being posted as well.

The idea being that Subaru has as much if not more rights to the images in question! After all, what are the tuned ROM images based off? OEM Subaru images!

I agree that posting byte-for-byte copies of vendor maps is not a good idea because of the potential Copyright violation. Not that I would use any of the OTS maps anyway. My primary interest in examining maps is to be able to learn from the various tuning strategies various tuners use so I can later apply them to my own car (someone get me a cable! ).

I seem to remember some talk about creating a generic specification which would allow users to create a diff from the base map. This diff could be applied to the base map from any year which would allow all WRX owners for example to share maps without having to copy tables over manually. This would probably be a good solution to the whole ROM issue problem. I wonder if Cobb would be interested in working to make this ECU diff compatible with StreetTuner. This would probably help their StreetTuner community get more active, frankly from what I have seen it has never taken off, RomRaider and EcuEdit have generated a much larger and active community around them in a much shorter time period!

I have an AccessPort myself, but am not satisfied with the OTS maps from Cobb. The Stage 1 map is just not happy on my car and the fuel we have here in CA as I got frequent ping under heavy load. I've tried to resolve this issue through Cobb, and exhanged a few emails with Trey a while back to try to get some tweaked maps, but he stopped responding. So in the end, I will sell my AP and buy a cable and tune my car myself! I would actually prefer to use the AP+ST for the real-time map switching, but I can't justify spending another $400 for it. So in the end, I will sell my AP and buy an OpenPort cable, tune my maps and be happy! I hope to be able to share my maps with others so they can learn from it.

For the moment, at least, all images are restricted. .HEX and .BIN files aren't allowed extensions.

The main difference here, though, is that Subaru (or Denso?) hasn't made it known that they have any problem with what's going on. And really, they'll never be out anything. They don't sell tunes, they sell cars with stock ECUs, a 1:1 ratio.

Here's another thing to consider when posting maps- tunes and tuning styles are pretty unique. So trying to post a commercially-tuned ROM by removing Cobb's or EcuTek's signatures is going to be obvious. I would say a good rule about posting is -if you can't explain why the changes were made then don't do it. What I mean by this is posting up a ROM, claiming you tuned it and then when someone asks why did you modify the timing in that area, you can't explain. Catch my drift? I would say the same holds true for disassembly of ROMs- If you find some maps and wouldn't mind sharing your techniques and giving some tips, it may help someone else in their work as well.

Starting a thread about, 'it looks like cobb likes to run a lot of boost in the midrange- why is that?' would probably be more than appropriate. Just don't post their ROMs when you do it. There are more than enough capable people on this forum to give opinions why. Let's learn from one another not just enable people to download canned maps to reflash their cars. If this forum can legitimately develop generic OTS maps, that would be great. I've considered it, but I really don't have the time right now to support something of that magnitude. Even though this is free, and I could put a disclaimer about not having liabilty, it doesn't mean I'd feel good about image that may cause problems on some cars.

drees- seems like you have some clear goals. What do other people hope to get out of this forum?

I personally use AP/ST on my car and I love it. I still see a lot of advantages to the commercial package than what is available for free. I've used RomRaider/EcuFlash as well and it is more than capable to get the job done for many setups. I've been hanging around here hoping to help people with tuning questions and maybe questions about grinders and ceramic coatings too. Right Jared?

Again, I haven't had as much time to devote to this as I'd like, but hopefully, in the next couple of months, my time will be freeing up a bit and I'll have more time to help. I'm not sure if people realize just how powerful these tools are.

Thanks,
Mike

Yeah, you're right. It would be really cool to have some RomRaider stage map unique to this site. If you look at a lot of the OTS maps, most of them are not signficantly drastic from the stock map, except for maybe boost targets/WDC%. I think it would be pretty cool if we came up with some maps on our own, starting from the stock map and each of us contributing our ideas for changing and then testing them on our own cars.

... regarding stage maps -

there are quite a few people who have tuned their car or had another member tuned it for them - mine included. crazymikie, for example, tuned and is tuning my car - that's a unique setup and tuned using RomRaider and ecuExplorer - that's a map I can post and maybe call it stage 3.5 -

just like crazymikie said, there are more than enough people capable of helping you or me on how to understand and tune our car properly without 'stealing' someone else' -

for now, let's steer away from maps or sharing maps that had been tuned, or slightly tuned by commercial products. jared along with others have spent countless hours to produce something that we could use for free - the least we could do is keep the community away from any kind of trouble

happy tuning! [/b]

I don't understand what sort of trouble we could get into really. Think about it, is there a disclaimer anywhere about Cobb saying that we can't download their image from our ecu? After all, it is OUR own ecu, let us do what we want with it.
I think there should be a section for images tuned solely for specific staged setups like....different turbos, or stock car, or stock car + exhaust, etc.
I don't beleive we need everyone's stage 2.1 maps(I admit I uploaded mine hehe).
Just my .02

Alright guys, I'll post once more and then I'm done talking about it.

First off, I'll be allowing ROMs again before too long. I just need to get a system figured out. We're not going to be posting Cobb's or anyone else's maps without their permission. And in case you were wondering, no, Cobb did not threaten me with a lawsuit or in any other way. I spoke with Trey and voluntarily cleaned up the site because it's the right thing to do.

Secondly, it's not about what we can do legally. It's about what would happen if anyone challenged me personally. If someone decided they wanted to take me to court over the content on this site, right or wrong, that's the end, unless somebody wants to start donating a lot of money for lawyers.

I didn't realize this...

The rest sounds good, let us know what details need to be worked out get us posting our own tunes. And if you want help moderating copied maps, let me know.

I for one do understand why posting ROM images is going to piss off the big tuners. Think of the hours, time and money some one like Cobb has put in to making their maps. If I put that kind of effort and money into it I would be a little peeved if some one took my map and said "hey look at this map I did, isnt it cool!" with no mention of my name or effort and money/time I put in to its devolpment. With out those tuners we may n ot have any maps or info to build on. So I give credit where credit is due. By the way anyone intrested in a used AP for an 02'???

If it's married still I'm interested. I'd like to do some testing. Also as far as any edited maps, I will be hosting them soon. I just need a front end to allow uploading on my site. I won't be hosting actual tuner roms but copies of them as I did here and any user tunes as well.