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Comment by rnovak | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

> 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.

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

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