> Neither of those examples gave you the right to re-distribute your modifications, and yet they were in fact valuable things to have.
Yes, it did!
You completely legally could buy a TV with the schematic included, use the schematic to modify your TV however you liked, and sell the modified TV. You could even use the schematic to develop some sort of modification-add-on for that model of TV and sell that add-on to people who wanted to modify their own TV. And that includes using any internal functionality of the TV whatsoever, and implementing any functionality whatsoever. If there was some function of a better model present on the PCB with just a few parts missing, you were perfectly within your rights to add the missing components and thus upgrade your TV to the premium version. And you were perfectly within your rights to tell others about how to do it. Or to sell kits with everything you needed to do the modification yourself. Or to sell the upgraded devices. Or to offer the modification as a service.
I just had a total flash back to the modification I made to a portable television to allow it to accept composite video directly. (This was back in the early computer days) It was described by an article in Radio-Electronics, and you got a specific model of TV and you could buy a small add-on circuit board, and then voila you had a "computer monitor" at a fraction of the price of buying a dedicated monitor.
But you were never going to put Heathkit or Zenith or any of these other companies out of business with your side markets. You could never compete even if you wanted to.
The cool thing about software is that one person, with one computer could totally disrupt a giant software company with a better widget because the manufacturing and distribution costs of software can be effectively zero.
> But you were never going to put Heathkit or Zenith or any of these other companies out of business with your side markets. You could never compete even if you wanted to.
That is the ex-post perspective: Those businesses that never became big weren't the ones that put the big companies out of business. And that is what you label "your side market" now. That doesn't mean other companies that ended up as serious competitors and that you wouldn't think of as "your side market" now didn't use such things to get started.
Also, even if you in fact couldn't put them out of business, that does not mean you didn't have a major influence on them. If small repair businesses around the country can upgrade your cheap TV model to a premium device for 50 bucks, that limits what you can charge for the premium model. Even if people are willing to pay a premium of 500 bucks, you won't be able to charge that. You may be able to charge more than the 50 bucks for convenience, but the mere fact that those repair shops exist prevents you from charging your customers as much as you otherwise would.
Yes, it did!
You completely legally could buy a TV with the schematic included, use the schematic to modify your TV however you liked, and sell the modified TV. You could even use the schematic to develop some sort of modification-add-on for that model of TV and sell that add-on to people who wanted to modify their own TV. And that includes using any internal functionality of the TV whatsoever, and implementing any functionality whatsoever. If there was some function of a better model present on the PCB with just a few parts missing, you were perfectly within your rights to add the missing components and thus upgrade your TV to the premium version. And you were perfectly within your rights to tell others about how to do it. Or to sell kits with everything you needed to do the modification yourself. Or to sell the upgraded devices. Or to offer the modification as a service.