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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."
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.
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>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.
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.
This sentiment is so wrong on so many levels. Stuff should not be "locked" in the first place.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Any EULA must be enforceable. Just because it is written down doesn't make it so. For example, the EULA can't say that the buyer must provide a webcam feed from their bedroom, or is required to deliver up their firstborn son on demand.
And that's what this is all about. What is valid and enforceable in a EULA and what is not. Hopefully the pendulum is swinging back to a common law conception of ownership, and damn all the restrictive EULAs. And if Apple or Microsoft or anyone else with restrictive EULAs wants to bow out of the marketplace because they can't fathom how to make a phone or a videogame console without restrictive EULAs, I say let them take their toys and go home. Their market shares will be taken up in a microsecond by plenty of companies willing to make a buck actually **selling** such things.
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.
I don't know about you, but it seems more like I live in the Land of the Fucking Owned. A land owned by fucking assholes, totalitarian politicians, selfish and infinitely greedy (and incredibly crooked) multi-national corporations, and foreign laws like the recent cell phone unlocking, which was conveniently signed away from American citizens, giving foreign countries the 'right' to dictate what we can and cannot do.
Why doesn't the U.S. just fully sell themselves out? It seems like they desperately want to. Most goods are already produced and/or manufactured in China. Most support calls to American companies already connect you to people from India or some other cheap country, who not only can't even speak or understand English worth shit, they don't seem to know a fucking thing about the question at hand.
The U.S. is excellent at outsourcing, incarceration, taking money, and generally just fucking over its citizens. Too bad those are not really the kinds of things you would want your home country to excel at.