DRM in TIG welders

Playing devil's advocate, I guess there are certain situations where you could justify this type of thing. Let's say that a product has an additional capability which 90% of the market doesn't need, but required significant research to accomplish. It's a soft-capability, so there's nothing additional that you need to manufacture to enable it. You have a couple of options - you can make two different models (essentially identical underneath, except for the cheaper one disabling the extra capability), but this is inefficient. You can of course have one product, one price. But this is also less than perfect, as you have everyone paying for a feature 10% want, and you can be outcompeted at a cheaper price for the basic product. Another option would be to DRM the product and soft-enable the feature for the 10% who want it, at a higher price.

I mean, it's a bit of a stretch, but it's plausible in some situations.

1. These are generally hardware drivers rather than generic software. If your computer comes without a text editor, anyone can provide your with one for whatever price they decide. If your oscilloscope comes without an I2C decoder, no-one else can add it.

2. Usually the software is used to cripple the device and then you pay to remove it. For example on oscilloscopes they use a software low-pass filter to limit its maximum frequency. You can pay to have it removed.

Your argument seems to be essentially "if they want to do this, they should have to produce identical models with slightly different firmware and give them different skus and blah blah blah blah blah"

That seems pretty silly.

These are market segmentation restrictions, they would normally just do what i suggested, and produce models with identical insides except for the firmware rom.

Why force them to do that, exactly? IE what grand purpose does it serve?

This is, IMHO, very different from "you've made it illegal for me to play with my phone that i own", because you don't want to put your stuff on it or mess with the hardware using your software, you just want to not pay for the stuff they wrote.

If you want to install your own firmware on the tig welder hardware, that isn't theirs, and you wrote, awesome, that sounds great. I'll support you to death.

What principle is it against? A buyer and a seller make a mutual agreement or they don't.

Due to one time expenses, some kinds of goods cannot exist without discriminatory pricing. (Where the total income from both low volume high price and high volume low price is required to make the good worth producing.)

I agree with this in principle.

>Imagine you would say something like that in education - that some children do not deserve the best education, simply because they may never use it. How do you know they will not find some use for it?

Sure, but the other side of this is that the guy who wrote the education curriculum ought to be paid, in order to encourage the development of further artistic works.

Absent some kind of taxpayer-funded way of compensating artists, how are they supposed to get a reasonable amount of money without denying non-payers access to their works?

>Also, the argument "if they didn't do it this way, they'd do it some other way" is interesting. In this nebulous form, it's often used to justify something morally fishy. Note that you can also use it other way around: Why should there be laws to protect DRM, if people who want to break will find some other way? The correct answer is, of course, the laws and regulations (legal system) are the correct resolution of this argument - we have them to steer people away from "other ways".

I agree that it's often used to justify something morally questionable. However, there's a distinction here, because the "other ways" that we're trying to steer manufacturers away from are not a clearly delineated set of behaviors. If you prevent people from crippling their products in software, they'll cripple them in hardware. If you prevent people from crippling their products in hardware, they'll make two different products with different features at two different prices, and costs will be higher all around. If you prevent someone from selling a less-featured version of another of their own products, they'll just make one of the two products, and some competitor will make the other.

That's the argument for not preventing manufacturers from crippling their products in software.

What about student discount at cinemas and other places?

Market segmentation generally allows producers to expands downwards in to lower market segments without cannibalising their full-price customers.

Crudely speaking, the alternative to a $5,000 full-featured device and the same device with a smaller set of features ("crippled") at $1,500 isn't a full-featured device at $1,500, it's a no device at $1,500.

Also a larger proportion of problems tend to be software problems, not hardware.

Hardware with open software interfaces might be the way of the future here. There could be whole ecosystems with that.

You've got the sequence of motivations and expectations of investments & revenue backwards.

A more accurate timeline is that before the product is built, the businesses will segment the potential markets. They estimate the various price curves of price-sensitive and price-insensitive customers and then use that to determine how much to allocate to each feature. Some features are valuable to price-insensitive customers. Some features are useful to all customers.

To say the above was "investment already made" is flawed because that perspective depends on reversing the timeline around in a way that businesses don't actually think. Instead of "sunk cost", it's actually a "before-we-build-it calculated investment" based on "future revenue projections".

Likewise, when a pre-med student considers going to medical school, he may envision a future where he provides medical care for free in Africa and at the same time earn a $200k+ salary as a hospital surgeon. Those future market segments affects his current decision to spend (go into debt) $150k+ for his medical degree. When the doctor is 40-something, we, as patients can't say that he should give us medical care for minimum wage because we morally deserve his services and his medical school tuition 10 years ago is a "sunk cost" anyway.

As for how a business delivers that segmentation of product to a customer, that is a separate issue. Some methods are perceived as more distasteful than others. The tig welder with a software config switch causes more outrage than a different physical chassis.

I completely disagree. Free market principles allow manufacturers to make whatever separate product lines they choose, and sell them at whatever price they can fetch. I see nothing immoral about this, but maybe you do.

> Why shouldn't everyone deserve access to the best tools, and by extension, best things? (Taking the production costs into account.) Best tools save time and make everybody more productive, which should be in everybody's interest.

People deserve what they pay for, what they bargain for. No more and no less.

> Imagine you would say something like that in education - that some children do not deserve the best education, simply because they may never use it. How do you know they will not find some use for it?

That's not the question. The analogous question would be, is it ok to allow them to purchase a more rudimentary education for a lower price? I see no reason why not.

> Also, the argument "if they didn't do it this way, they'd do it some other way" is interesting. In this nebulous form, it's often used to justify something morally fishy.

I was just responding to the idea that this is an "abusive" business practice. My point was that if the law didn't allow for them to segment the market this way, they'd just sell multiple hardware lines--crippled by physically having lower capabilities, etc. In that situation, no one is better off, and the manufacturer is somewhat worse off. So I have trouble swallowing the idea that this is abusive.