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.

Comments

Licensing has gone too far.

[altgrr]

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.

Re:Licensing has gone too far.

[sql*kitten]

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?

I don't see how you get from the first sentence to the second, but that's beside the point for now.

Owning a license is better than owning the real thing, if it's done properly. Think about it. If you lose your bank card, does that mean you've also lost the money in your account? No, because your account is effectively your license, so its physical representation, the card, can easily be replaced.

If you buy a license to a piece of music, then wouldn't it be great if you could trade in your cassette or LP for a SACD or DVD-Audio for just the cost of duplicating the media? Or if you owned a game for PC, you could also get a Mac version for a negligible charge, because what you own is not the CD it came on, but the right to play the game? That's how licensing could and should work.

Make the Xbox mods *clearly* for Linux use

[Morgaine]

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.

Re:Double standards?

[aronc]

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.