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Comment by URSpider94 | Hacker News Reader

In the US, unless you are signing a contract of some sort, then a sale is a sale. Any physical object that you simply buy at the store is yours, full stop.

I don't understand the comment that you make about not owning the batteries in an electric car. If you own the electric car, then you own the batteries, that's not in question.

However, manufacturers often put measures into place that make ownership less useful:

-- They might load software into the device that makes it respond to their control, and limits your ability to use the object

-- They might restrict availability of manuals, repair parts and other information to incentivize you to use their service facilities

However, I would argue that these are not the same as infringing on your ownership.

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I'm not sure if you've been keeping up with US news, but this isn't true, at least until it's decided in court. GM, John Deere, and Ford all have the opposite opinion[1][2][3]

[1]http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2015/04/john-deere-and...

[2]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150421/23581430744/gm-sa...

[3]http://news.boldride.com/2015/04/gm-wants-to-make-working-on...

Not to mention I think it's currently illegal to Jailbreak an iPhone or root an Android, despite them being yours.

I really do wish the US was as cut/dry as you make it seem, and I wish they cared about consumers more, but in reality, Companies get far more rights then we, as consumers, do.

Edit:Formatting

> Not to mention I think it's currently illegal to Jailbreak an iPhone or root an Android, despite them being yours.

Has the 2012 DMCA jailbreaking exemption now expired? I know exemptions expire every three years, but I wasn't sure exactly when.

From what I understand, the exemptions only allow jailbrakeing/rooting with permission from the Manufacturer, which I highly doubt would be given from 80-90% of manufacturers

Your parent is referring to a DMCA exemption approved by the US Copyright Office in 2012. Jailbreaking phones is currently legal "where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of [lawfully obtained software] applications with computer programs on the telephone handset"[0], while jailbreaking tablets is not.

See also this timeline of the EFF's efforts in getting DMCA exemptions: https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking#United_States

It will expire in late October this year if the Librarian of Congress/US Copyright Office does not renew the exemption.

The hardware is yours. If you want to blow away the firmware and write your own, no one can (legally) stop you on copyright grounds, though it might lose its street-legal status in the interest of the people you might manslaughter by writing buggy code.

It's where you want to modify the software and post a derivative work online that copyright law kicks in. You may as well say that you do not "own" a book, because you don't have the right to share an edited version of it. Sort of true, but not very interesting.

Last time I checked, other than the Nexus phones, pretty much every manufacturer locks down their bootloaders, so no, you can't "blow away the firmware and write your own".

> If you want to blow away the firmware...

False premise: you often cannot blow away the firmware, because it is either hard-coded, or signed.

And even when said premise is correct for a device, there are cases where the firmware inherently requires copyrighted material (For instance, requiring a (copyrighted) poem in a handshake).

> And even when said premise is correct for a device, there are cases where the firmware inherently requires copyrighted material (For instance, requiring a (copyrighted) poem in a handshake).

No way! Copyright law does not prevent someone from creating a new work that is designed to be compatible with an old work. Likely outcomes are that the poem would not qualify for copyright protection for that usage (it's not a poem as much as a sequence of arbitrary bytes to be read only by a computer), or that a fair use finding would be made, perhaps on the grounds that the copy does not affect the market for the original work - i.e. nobody was paying for the poem. Most likely a judge would just throw out the entire case at the start as a waste of the court's time.

Why do you think Oracle has so many lawyers?

And when someone embeds an entire book (that was otherwise written and they have the rights for) into the handshake, what then?

What the manufacturer makes it easy to do and what you can get in legal trouble for are different things.

Do you want the state to use men with guns to force everything with a microcontroller in it to also come with an SDK? I'm basically a socialist, and even I think that's ridiculous overreach.

Unlocking your phone in the US was actually illegal until August 1st of 2014.

You could be held for circumvention of copy protection schemes.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/unlocking-new-cel...

If you wiped the software rather than modifying it to unlock it, that probably wouldn't be illegal.

> there are cases where the firmware inherently requires copyrighted material (For instance, requiring a (copyrighted) poem in a handshake).

Yes, I'm well aware of these restrictions. However, I don't think they impact whether or not you own the THING.

What GM, Ford, John Deere, Apple, etc. have said is that you can't tinker with their firmware that is installed on the device. None of them would argue that they can come repossess your tractor/car/mobile phone.

As others have pointed out, it is not currently illegal to jailbreak a phone, though that may change in the near future.

To make an analogy and play devil's advocate a little further, it would be hard to argue that I don't own my home. There is a deed to that effect recorded with the county, more than I can say for anything else I own. Yet:

* The state can take it from me in short order if I don't pay my taxes

* I have to get a permit from the city to make any substantial modifications to the property

* There is a neighborhood association that dictates property uses as well, which I have to comply with

* I couldn't just knock the house down and build a car repair garage -- city zoning ordinances restrict how I use my property.

And yet, I don't hear a big outcry that I don't truly own my house.

You forgot one. Most likely, the bank has first claim on your house.

With a mortgage, in some sense you really don't own your own home. You have equity in the home, and the home is collateral on your debt for the home, so until you've payed everything off, the bank owns the home. Equity and Ownership are related, but not equivalent concepts.

If you read that John Deere article, their specific quote is actually that you don't own the vehicle itself:

    ... an implied license for the life of the 
    vehicle to operate the vehicle

And fundamentally then, I think that I disagree with that particular view of ownership. I think my views align well with those declared by the EFF, in that I believe you should be allowed to tinker with your stuff.

It is perfectly legal to jailbreak a phone... If you own it. You can't legally jailbreak it if it is on contract.

> They might load software into the device that makes it respond to their control, and limits your ability to use the object

I'd say that's a pretty direct infringement on my ownership, but then again I've got a few tin-foil hats lying around.

I agree what you say should be true, but companies are trying to change the First-Sale Doctrine. Companies like John Deer say you are licensing the tech, not buying it, thus you do not own everything in the vehicle you 'bought'. Software companies have used this logic for years and it's beginning to bleed over into hardware. Companies want you to license things and do away with ownership. I'm on your side though, I believe in the First-Sale Doctrine and do not want to see it undermined, but there's a financial incentive for companies to do away with it and they will keep trying unless we make hard rulings in cases like this one against Lexmark. Look at what Nintendo tried to do with the resale market of their game discs and cartridges.

Wait, the John Deere lawsuits were about hardware? I thought they were arguing that they only licensed (and didn't sell) the firmware controlling their newer tractors. I.e., the same bullshit companies have been pulling for decades. IIRC, the original inspiration for the Free Software Foundation was a buggy, restrictively licensed printer driver.

Sorry, didn't mean to muddy the conversation. It's not the hardware they say is licensed, it's the necessary software used to run the machine. Either way, you don't own the entire product, only part of it, and the most essential part is what is licensed. Without the software the hardware is useless so it may as well be the hardware.

In theory, someone could write GPL tractor firmware, and I don't think anyone from John Deere could legally prevent you from replacing their locked-down firmware with GnuTractor or whatever. (Then again, IANAL, so maybe they could?)

Frankly, this seems like an area where the FSF could do a lot of good and garner a lot of goodwill.

If Apple can void your warranty for jailbreaking I'm sure John Deere could do the same.

>However, I would argue that these are not the same as infringing on your ownership.

You could argue that, but you'd be going against the clear meaning of ownership over the last few hundred years.

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