A friend of mine sent me this link today, which was also waiting in my RSS reader for me: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080331-creative-irate-after-modder-spruces-up-vista-x-fi-drivers.html

Let me reproduce some of the most relevant parts here:

"We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards... by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards." writes O'Shaughnessy. "In principle, we don't have a problem with you helping users in this way.. .Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended."

He continues, "By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own... If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make."

According to Creative's own FAQ, sound cards from the X-Fi and Audigy families are incapable of decoding Dolby Digital or DTS, due to the fact that "these functions are not supported at driver level in Windows Vista." This isn't true.  When two of the driver files from a standard X-Fi card are replaced with two driver files drawn from a Dell-specific driver available at the company's support web site, DTS and DD decoding immediately reappear as options and function correctly. Creative might be able to get away with saying that DTS and DD decoding aren't enabled at the driver level for X-Fi and Audigy cards, but the functionality is clearly baked into the driver and is thus supported. Creative may never come straight out and say "It's Microsoft's fault that your cards doesn't work," but the Vista support pages are loaded with descriptions of how Vista's audio system broke Creative products. 

This, presumably, is the feature that ticked Creative off, though Daniel_K has enabled other features Creative didn't plan to support in Vista, including DVD-Audio. Anecdotal forum evidence implies that his drivers are of much higher quality and are more stable than those Creative officially provides, but Ars has not verified this. "

So, this is my opinion based on my understanding of US Law and what I believe to be Ethical behavior.  First of all, I don't believe it is legal for the programmer in question to do this.  When you purchase the Creative product, you are agreeing to their license terms by using the product.  This alone should be enough to allow free markets to satisfy any need that could possibly arise in this situation:

• If computer users do not wish to agree to any terms they feel are overly restrictive (not being able to hack drivers), they should not buy the product.  If companies lose sales because of this, products will arise to meet this demand.  The term "open source hardware" has been thrown around, where the platform itself is out there for people to implement their own software on top of.
• If consumers do not purchase sound cards because they can't understand the EULA and yet they understand they'll be bound by the EULA, the market can respond by providing simpler EULA.
• Taking this one step furthur, buying a pre-built machine from Alienware, for example, would implicitly require agreeing to the EULA of every single piece of the PC.  Again, if people do not buy as many computers because of this, the market can respond with PCs that are Easier to Own.

This is my logic concerning the compay's rights:

1. Few people would argue with the fact that a compay (like Creative) might want to offer different products, with different levels of Capabilities, at different price points.
2. The market self-organizes, with people who want the extra capabilities able to get them if they are able to pay for them.
3. Most people would have no issue deciding for themselves whether or not to buy the V6 Mustang or the V8 Mustang based on their own resources and how important more horespower was to them personally.  In the case of less-tangible Products such as software, it seems that people lose their ability recognize Property as Property, theft as theft, which I've written about before.
4. A company may determine at some point in it's product development lifecycle that it is cheaper for them to include the same hardware in both the less featured and the fully featured versions of the final product.  When R&D and Testing costs are taken into account this can have some surprising manifestations.  At some point many years ago I bought an Aragon Stage One preprocessor (made by Klipsch) for my home theater, this product retailed for $4,000 at the time.  Shortly thereafter I bought the Klipsch Promedia Ultra 5.1 computer speakers for perhaps $299 or so.  I found out later that the SAME processing chip was in each one, the good, expensive surround processing chip.  Klipsch had determined it would be cheaper to use the chip from the Stage One even though the Silicon was very expensive: it was already proven and could be implemented with almost no engineering work.
5. Creative should be allowed to turn on or off features in its Products via hardware or software as it sees fit.  The fact that the chip could do this but is "artificially" held back by drivers is an aspect of the agreement between the customer and Creative Labs, and is not a chance for people who disregard Intellectual Property rights to get something for nothing.  Whatever features are purposely crippled in this or that product are value-add features that Creative Labs intended to sell for money.