Slashdot Mirror
The Lik-Sang Saga Continues
The sage of Lik-Sang has continued with Dan Gillmor's recent visit to the region. He and Alex Kampl met and talked for a while. The comparasions are good ones - and ones that are clearly enough drawn that everyone should see the loss of their rights.
Everywhere we look, all we can see is licensing. Regardless of whether the product be a tangible item (such as a games console), or a service (your phone connection, a piece of software), there are license agreements telling you what you may and may not do with it.
Is there going to come a point where we will not actually own anything, merely own a license to use it? Do we really want to owe our souls to the capitalist companies we work for?
Perhaps I'm exaggerating here, but I think it's a future that, currently, is coming for us, and one that I certainly don't want to live in.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
"The issue is front and center in an obscure but important legal battle under way in Hong Kong. The three major video-game console makers -- Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft -- have used the courts against a seller of hardware modification chips, often called ``mod chips,'' that give the boxes more capabilities than the makers allow when sold off the shelf."
I wonder how the amount of money spent on legal fees compares to the $$ lost from just allowing mod chips? Is this just a principle thing?
A lot of these prosecutions seem to hinge on a modification being marketed in a fashion that leaves its intended purpose open to interpretation.
While lawyers will of course always oil the wheels of litigatation regardless of commonsense, morality, ethics, or the laws of physics, one should at least make it a little bit harder for them wherever possible.
For example, in the case of the Xbox mod chip, if a company created and marketed a device with the single and sole purpose of allowing Linux to be booted natively on powerup, and supported this purpose with Xbox Linux distros on its website plus all the relevant FAQs, and with extra features in the bootstrap making the purpose plain (eg. kernel boot parameter storage) as well as displaying a prominent intended-use disclaimer, this would make litigating against the company significantly harder than at present.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Actually, it's rather easy. In one case you are being granted rights that you otherwise wouldn't have. That's the GPL. It's like saying I'll give you free reign in my house if you promise to clean up after yourself. You come in and don't clean I have the right to bitch.
The other case has companies trying to artificially remove rights that you already have under current law, that being the right to use something you've purchased however you see fit. That includes breaking out the soldier and a flash-rom you bought and having fun.
To summerise - I give you extra rights with some conditions and you break them == justified bitching. You try to take away rights I already have == justified bitching.
jello.
aka aron.
The analogy given in the article of a car manufacturer dictating where the car may be repaired is fairly good, but maybe this analogy would be even better.
The primary purpose of a DVD player or a DVD/CD-based games console is to play media. The primary purpose of a car is to transport passengers.
Consider then the uproar that would be caused if a US car manufacturer only allowed US nationals to be transported in its cars, only Japanese nationals in Japanese-manufactured cars, and so on. That is the direct counterpart to DVD and game regionalization. It's wrong, regardless of the economic reasoning behind it.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra