Hacker News Reader

Comment by DavidWanjiru | Hacker News Reader

Is it legally enforceable for a company to dictate what you can or cannot do with a phone that you bought from them? Sure, the terms said whatever they said, but is it enforceable/constitutional? I mean, people sell their phones all the time for whatever reason.

View on HN

I would have thought the Doctrine of First Sale protects you legally (as in, they can't sue you for reselling a phone), but I don't think there's any legal protections on provision of a service.

Bottom line: Never rely on a corporation.

The doctrine of first sale is dead. It died to the copyright cartels. You own nothing where a copyright is involved. The copyright maintains ownership of the device, not you.

The courts may have once done something about books with shrinkwrap agreements forbidding sale, but the same does not apply to software or things containing software.

Probably not. In this case, everyone set their shipping address to one location though, so Google simply cancelled the orders. (And then digitally killed everyone who placed them.) Had they shipped them to themselves and then shipped them elsewhere, this would not have been possible, but it would have cut into their profit margins a lot.

Did the terms say you can't resell the phone or that if you resell the phone Google will terminate your account? The latter is completely legal as far as I understand it.

Yeah, that was going to be my question. (if) I bought and paid for your phone, why do you give 2 shits about what I do with it?

Of course, maybe the answer is "we sell the phones at a loss, and you are only supposed to get one, so we have a tentacle around you". Who knows...

It may also be that they were preventing scalpers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com