Comment by somenameforme
20 days ago
We have! The only problem is a very limited amount of legal decisions accidentally paved the way for a massive dystopia. In particular, the first sale doctrine [1] solves everything immediately.
The courts assumed good faith with a licensing exception, and maybe it was. But that opened the door to essentially completely dismantle the first-sale doctrine. Get rid of that loophole and all this stupidity ends, immediately. Well that and the DMCA. Once you buy something, it's yours to do whatever you want to do with it short of replicating it for commercial benefit.
We also need regulation to prevent unbreakable hardware locks. Integrating the locks deep into VLSI makes removing them unrealistic.
As a more specific way to do this, I'd like to see any software that hardware companies make for their own hardware designated (at the choice of the company) as either part of the hardware or a separate product. In the former case, it must be made available under GPLv3 with full anti-tivoization provisions. In the latter case, it must use only public and documented interfaces and must be completely realistic for another company to make a competing product on a level playing field. Ideally the separate products would also need to be highly cross platform if technically feasible where the burden of showing that it isn't is on the developer.
I'm not sure if we need regulations preventing it as much as we need regulations that manufacturers have to make it clear before buying the product.
Informed consent goes a long way.
Most users don't understand the higher order effects of lack of ownership, if they care at all when it doesn't impact convenience in an obvious way. This information already exists before purchase, but it doesn't move sales among the masses where the money is made. The result is zero viable ownership respecting products for those of us who care: all modern CPUs have IME or equivalent, all modern cars are infested with proprietary spyware, all phones at reasonable prices¹ don't fully embrace user ownership in various ways. This also has higher order effects that affect everyone, such as car insurance having an involuntary data mine on anyone who drives a modern car.
1: the exception that I'm thinking of here is fair phone, and it isn't much of an exception.
6 replies →