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Comment by crwalker | Hacker News Reader

This is great! The push by large companies to replace personal asset ownership with perpetual rent is worth fighting against.

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On that note, I wonder if the law will ever view misprepresenting the ownership of a device as fraudulent business practice.

Suppose some hardware is sold to you, in the ancient ownership sense[1]. Then some time later, the maker decides that you must use only authorized parts, or they will not continue to provide a cloud service for it, or that it's just plain EOL. Then, you never really owned it - you were renting it. So was that original purchase actually a lease, but misrepresented?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi

Yeah. More broadly, I think digital devices should be loyal to their owners rather than a 3rd party like the manufacturer or a surveillance/credit/ad agency.

Part of the solution may be legal, but I also think that the architecture of the device will need to change, e.g. to remove the technical ability of the manufacturer to remotely brick it.

While it would be hard to argue in court, a copyright holder attempting to extend copyright beyond the scope of that copy-related right could be misuse of copyright[1]. Based on the doctrine of "unclean hands", a judge could rule a copyright to be unenforceable if the copyright holder tries to enforce some type of property right clearly outside the scope of the copyright protected work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_misuse

This is not just with hardware. It annoys me no end that there's a big "BUY NOW" button on Amazon when you're looking at an ebook, but with their digital restrictions management, you are really only leasing the ebook.

Could you get a class-action lawsuit together from everyone who's "bought" a digital book, and sue them for false advertisement?

If Rich Rebuild's Youtube channel is to be believed, that's exactly what happens with Tesla if they're declared as dead and then someone buys it, fixes it but in Tesla's system the VIN has been declared dead. They lock you out of the supercharger network and won't sell you parts for it (at least that's what he explains)

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