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We Should Be Allowed To Unlock Everything We Own
An anonymous reader writes "When cell phone unlocking became illegal last month, it set off a firestorm of debate over what rights people should have for phones they have legally purchased. But this is really just one facet of a much larger problem with property rights in general. 'Silicon permeates and powers almost everything we own. This is a property rights issue, and current copyright law gets it backwards, turning regular people — like students, researchers, and small business owners — into criminals. Fortune 500 telecom manufacturer Avaya, for example, is known for suing service companies, accusing them of violating copyright for simply using a password to log in to their phone systems. That's right: typing in a password is considered "reproducing copyrighted material." Manufacturers have systematically used copyright in this manner over the past 20 years to limit our access to information. Technology has moved too fast for copyright laws to keep pace, so corporations have been exploiting the lag to create information monopolies at our expense and for their profit. After years of extensions and so-called improvements, copyright has turned Mickey Mouse into a monster who can never die.' We need to win the fight for unlocking phones, and then keep pushing until we actually own the objects we own again."
thats right brother yell it in the streets spread the good word
Our property is our property, and we should be able to do with it as we please. Further, breaking encryption is just math. Prohibitions on any sort of math amounts to thought crime. They want to make it illegal to figure things out.
The standard excuse for all this bad policy is that without DRM, our music, movies, and video gaming industries would collapse. I say, let them. It's just entertainment, which is a surprisingly small part of the economy (Google could buy the RIAA outright easily). Much better to let that happen than to enshrine bad policy as law for decades to come. And I'm willing to bet that people will find ways to entertain themselves anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
>We Should Be Allowed To Unlock Everything We Own
I think there is a misconception here: You only own everything you are able to unlock.
If you can't do that, you don't "own" it, you're "owned".
Can someone explain to me what the fuss is about unlocking?
If I understand it right, you are not allowed to unlock a phone which you are buying with monthly contract.
Well, makes sense to me, you haven't paid the device fully, it's not yours to hack.
Once you've paid the (24 month?) contract you're free to do what you want with the device.
If you don't like those terms why did you even buy the phone with contract rather than directly with cash?
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Nope.
Unless there is a contract negotiation, there is no contract.
Therefore it is a personal property sale. Pretending that personal property is an implied contract is precisely the sort of NONSENSE that this article is complaining about. It's just a way for powerful corporations to subvert your property rights and abuse all of us.
It's high time that citizens started pushing back.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That's what the contract break fee is for, to pay that back. The customer owns the phone at all points along there, if they didn't, then the carier would have to pay to replace it if it broke. The customer owns the phone, they're just financing it via a non-optional rider to their plan.
Just some thoughts:
1) how does an organization mitigate its liability for subsequent services needed to pull users out of a drink that unlocked their stuff, changed something critical, and bricked the unit? Not all people are responsible with settings..... the unwitting, children, etc.
2) if we take ownership, do we also take responsibility for subsequent access? What happens if charges are incurred through the use of an unprotected device, say, a smartphone that gets hijacked and gets a texting malware that runs up charges? What of those charges?
3) can we then sell a device that's unlocked, and be free from subsequent liability incurred by the purchaser? What if they hurt themselves?
I'm not so sure these things are clear, and if people are willing to have the keys. Me, I rooted my phone, and find platforms that aren't open and transportable to be not my choosing. But I can take responsibility, and I'm not sure there's a cultural or legal standard that changes culpability so easily.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
That's sort of the point, though, isn't it? An EULA that governs a service is one thing, but an EULA that governs a physical product is something else entirely. A manufacturer exercising ownership rights over a piece of hardware that you have purchased outright, to which said manufacturer holds no obligation beyond addressing manufacturing defects, is patently (heh) absurd. That we're even having this discussion is a testament to the sad state of affairs in which we currently find our copyright/patent laws.
Seriously Boycott Apple and Microsoft, that are locking hardware. Its not hard to support companies that have open hardware. The fact that your xbox, and iDevices are locked down is only part of the problem...and soon your general purpose computer.
I'm sorry your favourite abusive mega corporation wants to lock you into their self styled ecosystem. Its easy to walk away...I did.
I'd vote for truth in advertising laws making it very clear that much of what you "buy" you don't really own. When consumers are treated as criminals and not trusted the use of the products they"buy", call it what it is, rental. So you don't own your Wii, Xbox, Playstation or any of your video games, Blue Ray disks (can't play them overseas), iTunes downloads, Android apps, iPhone apps, your car, your TV, your Windows 8 laptop, your printer. And you certainly don't own your iPhone, iPad, iPod, Macbook or any other Apple products.
Now that Joe sixpack has happy bent over and submitted to this state of affairs, corporate giants are free to expand this subscription model to everything from your refrigerator to your clothing. And if you're a citizen of the US, your tax dollars are paying for FBI and other law enforcement agencies against the likes of you. As Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan put it, "We have billionaires to protect!"
There's nothing 'obviously' about this. It's not a grey area. Either you limit everything or you limit nothing.
Medical devices, utility meters, safety systems, casino games, ATMs, airplane navigation systems should all be secured, by the hardware, in such a way that NOBODY can unlock them once they leave the manufacturer's hands. Pretending that some copyright law will protect these devices does nothing more than feed homeless lawyers.
Especially sensitive devices such as medical and safety relevant devices should not be a black box where it is illegal to look into the inner workings. While third-party liability is nice this is still just based on trust and not on tests. My trust into these system would increase quite a bit if a hacker plays around with a utility meter and finds no obvious vulnerability.
I want all my devices unlocked, the liability can be linked to a tamperproof soft/hardware seal as it is already done today. This is fine with me, I do not expect the manufacturer to be liable if I took it apart, hacked it and reassembled it but I do not see any advantage in making hacking illegal.