Someone asks, Why does apple get a free ride?
What's the difference between "DVD Jon" and this person posting the iPod Touch firmware? Easy, DVD Jon is posting code that -he- wrote. He had to reverse someone else's mechanism to make the code do what he want, but he did that work and he wrote the code and he owns the copyright.
However, this iPod touch person didn't write the iPod touch firmware. Apple did, and they own it. They can control distribution of it. Very few people argue that copyrights over code are a bad thing. Without copyrights, the GPL doesn't work, because there would be no protection of the copy-left.
It doesn't matter that it's password protected and only available to a few, that's still publishing and re-distributing it, something he doesn't have the right to do. It's a licensed, compiled binary, written by Apple. Just like Windows.
It's exactly the same thing as posting a copy of Photoshop on your website, even if it's password protected and only a few people have the password. More reasonable? Sure, since the firmware effort is more educational and done with a eye towards exploration rather than monetary gain or piracy (since it requires hardware purchase anyway). But in the eyes of the law it's the same.
Update: Minor typo fix.
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