Hector Martin

Wait it's bricked from the SERVER side?

As far as we could tell, yeah.

So realistically, the only way to recover the devices is just a custom firmware and reimplementing their servers locally?

Which, I'm not speaking to the ethics of it here, I'm just saying, would almost certainly be a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.

That's not how the DMCA works. If you're replacing Sonos firmware with your own the DMCA has nothing to say, because you aren't accessing any copyrighted content.

That depends on whether the firmware is allowing you to access copyrighted code on the device when you would otherwise not be able to do so. Since that includes the rest of the code in the firmware, unless you literally write a new firmware from scratch AND the device...

... contains no other copyrighted code which you now have access to when you didn’t before, the question is not so simple as it might first appear.

If you replace the whole firmware, then there is no copyrighted code (other than the bootrom, but Sonos didn't write that) left. At most there may be crypto keys in the hardware used for streaming stuff, but you can ignore them.