Angered by missing Bluetooth features in the V710, some users are offering to pony up to 3rd party developers to bring them back.
The Motorola V710 handset, available only through Verizon in the US, is advertised from Motorola as having support for numerous Bluetooth profiles as well as an e-mail client. However, many of those advertised features are missing from the Verizon version of the phone, much to the annoyance of many users.
Some have now banded together to start a "V710 Hackers Reward Program", offering a bounty to the first developer(s) to offer 3rd party software to restore the missing features. Specifically, the current bounty is for enabling OBEX and OPP Bluetooth profiles on the phone, necessary for device-to-device transfer of photos and PIM information. Absent those profiles, such data must be sent through Verizon's network, incurring service costs. Many users have expressed belief that is the reason those features were removed from the phone.
The Hacker Reward Program page also explicitly states that, in their belief, the program does not violate the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which outlaws circumventing copy-prevention mechanisms. Since the only copyrighted material involved would be pictures the user has taken, which would be owned by the user, enabling the user to do more with their own phone and own images should not be a violation of the DMCA. However, the DMCA has in the past been referenced in cases that were also just as seemingly benign.
Such developer bounties are not new, and have been created before when a company, in the eyes of users, left a feature incomplete, absent, or crippled. Most, although not all, have eventually gone uncollected. As of this writing the V710 Hacker Rewards Program bounty stands at just over $1000 USD.
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