Licensing is not the same as purchasing. I don’t think banning the concept of licensing would be helpful.
All of them will be licensed, almost abolishing private ownership. If we idly accept licensing of everything, we will enjoy what will be basically serfdom.
People that were writing these laws never imagined they would prevent you from repairing a cat-feeder or a lighting system. They were intended for another purpose entirely. Maybe it's time we stopped misusing those laws and created a separate body of law for this specifically.
This is already happening. I work in an engineering consulting, specialising on consumer electronics. I have to admit, the wider industry is becoming a part of the issue: everybody wants to become like Apple.
We have an enormous tide of new clients incoming, with prime majority of them having no previous experience doing anything with electronics whatsoever.
If we ignore customers with out in the clouds fantasies, we will be losing like 3/4 of the new business, on another, we will be loosing our engineers who will be leaving to work on something more interesting and merit worthy.
The hottest buzzword among Silicon Valley accelerator bred entrepreneurs I see is "product-as-a-service," which basically you buying a product, but still having to pay to use it even after you already own it.
We have a joke that soon even toilet paper rolls will come chipped, and the paper will not work unless you pay somebody on the internet.
Unfortunately not: https://futureiot.tech/ikea-sets-up-smart-home-business-unit...
It's sort of unfortunate. I can see having an idea, and wanting to start a business, but not have people copy it wholesale. But I can also see that people who do start companies go the full-tyranny route - closed source, phone app only, invasive data collection, until purchasing something is a compromise on every level.
It's very reasonable to say that the vendors created an expectation of ownership to push their sale.
If you didn't notice that I called them "vendors" instead of "leasers", it adds to my point.
If a house, a car, a shirt, or a phone is offered to you for sale, and you buy it, then you should own it.
FWIW, I agree with you. Please don't attack a straw-man!
Even if you don't mention them explicitly, you still have to acknowledge the difference because one of your examples was "software object".
When consumers pay money for software, it almost always licensed and not bought. If you buy MS Windows 10 from Amazon.com, you purchased a license. If you truly want to "buy" Windows 10 in the same sense as your other non-software examples, you'd have to convince Microsoft to sell you the "ownership of the codebase" or have enough billions to acquire the entire Microsoft corporation to "own" Windows 10.
- "buy software" the legal ownership sense : as in buying the copyright which is usually something companies (not consumers) do when they buy the intellectual property rights. E.g. Adobe Inc buys Macromedia Dreamweaver. This is the true ownership.
- "buy software" the casual sense : which just means the consumer getting a CD or a digital download to install a copy of the software. This the license not the ownership.
They are 2 different things that use the same word "buy" and just because a commentary omits the word "license" doesn't mean the above distinctions go away.
It's a similar distinction for many types of intellectual property. Photographers of weddings usually don't let couples buy the wedding photos in a legal ownership sense. Instead, they sell some prints with a license for use. Same with musicians selling "songs" to the public. People bought a license and not the copyright. Paul McCartney doesn't even "own" the songs he wrote with The Beatles. Thus, Paul McCartney can't do "anything he wants" with the song "Yesterday". He can't "resell the song" to somebody else like a used book. Instead, he has to ask for Sony's permission.
Does anyone "force" couples to license photos instead of buy them? In one sense, no. The bride & groom could conceivably contract with a photographer on a "work for hire" basis and thus own the copyrights to the photos. But most couples don't do that. Newspapers and magazines do establish "work for hire" with freelance photographers so they can own the photographs but most wedding couples don't.
As other commenters mentioned, the real issue is the slippery word "buy" that defies consumers' natural intuition of what that means. If you're really leasing/renting/licensing something, you need to make that clear.
You mentioned buying a software product, but that is not commonly done by consumers. We all license software. Buying software means buying the copyright and become owner of it. The replies mention changing software copyright for consumer products. I can imagine that to be a good idea, but I don't see the EU making GPLv3 software mandatory for software products. I don't see a way forward yet.
> Buying software means buying the copyright and become owner of it.
No, when people use the word "buy" here, they're using it in the same way I might buy a physical book.
When I buy a book, I'm free to write in it, scan it, transcribe it, rip it in half, reglue the spine, put a dust cover on it, or resell it. I'm not free to republish it or violate the author's copyright.
When I buy a piece of software, I should be free to hotpatch the DLL, back up the product, put wrappers around it, examine it, write about it, or resell it. That doesn't mean the owner should lose their copyright. You're conflating two unrelated concepts -- the abolition of copyright and the erosion of basic consumer ownership rights that have been established for centuries.
In fact, the EU already has a right to resale for digital software. And yet, despite that consumer-friendly rule, not every piece of software in the EU is currently GPLv3 licensed.
All that people are saying is that our rights as consumers shouldn't go away just because we bought a digital book instead of a physical one.
Other things being equal, I would agree. However, if market forces push us into a choice between ordinary people being able to own things and use them freely against ordinary people being forced to pay rent on everything forever and use things only as some higher power dictates, it's not going to take long to make that choice. This is the choice that we are heading towards with the increasing use of software and, in particular, the repurposing of laws originally intended to prevent exploiting the work of others to create software so that they constrain the ordinary use of a product by the person who bought it.
When the majority (consumers) decide they want everything for free and that they want absolute power over the creations of others creators will simply stop revealing what they create and stop making their creations available for purchase. Instead creating things for private use.
The vast majority of these "creators and skilled professionals" are doing work for hire for the same people who own everything else, and have absolutely no control over the product of their labor.
This is different from outright purchase of the car, where you can literally drive it to the nearest scrap yard and have it crushed right after purchase :)
Even this right is being eroded - see Tesla. You can drive it to the scrap yard, but someone else can't always drive it back out.