There's several aspects top this issue. One of them is if what's printed on the box (in a foreign language, hidden under the carrier's custom box, making a reference to Ovi instead of MyNokia and claiming that you'll need to register, not that the device itself will "register") is enough to make all of this legal. - I doubt it, but it'll come down to who pays more for the lawyers.

The other issue is a matter of trust and the image it creates. One of the assets Nokia had was that they did not, as Apple or Google, enforce anything on their customer's devices. That was true for Nokia, but even more so for Maemo devices.

They threw that asset away for nothing. There's nobody who benefits from these MyNokia messages. (Except the carriers maybe.) Consumers get wrong information and are pointed to non-existent websites, and Nokia probably doesn't gather information that's really useful either. So why do it? And even worse, why be so stubborn to continue with this farce, making up annoyingly embarrassing things like "The device is a mobile computer because it can take pictures, therefore you need to receive our text messages"? What???

It's the issue of trust, of who owns my device and who controls it that's important to me. Even if 100 Nokia-lawyers tell me it's legal what they do: That won't re-earn them my trust. From now on, it seems we'll have to hack our own devices so that we can really own them.

What was it I was trying to say with this post? Oh... don't let them involve you in legal battles. It doesn't matter if it's legal. All that matters is if it's right.