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The Lik-Sang Saga Continues

Posted by Hemos on from the good-coverage dept.

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.

5 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Licensing has gone too far. by altgrr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Licensing has gone too far. by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Licensing has gone too far. by surprise_audit · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Sadly, though, that will never happen as long as vendors continue to get away with selling you the same license over and over again so that you can access the product on different media.

      It would indeed be great to buy (the right to watch) a movie on a DVD, and for little or no extra cost, be able to copy it to video tape to watch elsewhere in the house. For such a future to exist, all your entertainment media systems would have to talk to each other to determine that any given "license" wasn't being used in more places in your house than you have licenses for.

      Better yet, instead of multiple DVD, VCR and CD players around the house, have a central server that "checks out" a movie to the living room TV and won't allow it to play in the bedroom until it finishes, or stops, in the living room.

  2. Make the Xbox mods *clearly* for Linux use by Morgaine · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. The car analogy by shoppa · · Score: 5, Informative

    The car analogy at the beginning of the story is more true than the writer knows. Car manufacturers did attempt to lock car buyers into extra-pricey dealer service, and the US Congress did react by passing the Magnusson-Moss act. Not only did this "unlock the hood", it also fixed things so that you wouldn't violate the warranty just by doing your own oil change.