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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

It's true for every video game console, which have run to up to $600. I'm not sure if $400 makes that much of a difference.

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Manufacturers love it. Inkjet printers, coffee makers, cars, vacuum cleaners, laptops. If a manufacturer thinks it can get away with monopolising parts, accessories, and services it will try it.

If Epic does win it could set a very wide-reaching precedent.

On the flip side, the fact that no one has successfully sued manufacturers of inkjet printers, coffee makers, cars, vacuum cleaners, and laptops over this issue should give you some clues as to how likely it is for Epic to win their case.

The lawsuit doesn’t have to succeed in court for Epic to succeed. If the case generates enough publicity but ultimately fails, they may be able to lobby Congress for a new law akin to the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act [1]. Then, instead of precedent they might have statutory protection for what they want to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...

Philips tried to block other companies from making Senseo-compatible coffee pads. The European Patent Office revoked Philips' patent after opposition of competitors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senseo#Revocation_by_the_Europ...

And actually in the case of Inkjet printers, the court of appeals and the supreme court ruled in favor of companies making third-party cartridges and refills:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_cartridge#Legality_of_refi...

The EU started an antitrust investigation into Apple's App Store practices:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...

Retaliation, such as this one by Apple, or the recent kerfuffle around the WordPress app are only going to increase the probability of antitrust action against Apple.

The EU cases aren't likely to inform how Epic's case is going to work out in a US court. The European Commission also just lost a lawsuit against Apple so just because they take an aggressive position doesn't mean it will hold up in court.

The Lexmark case was about whether patents right end once a patented product is sold and doesn't seem to be directly applicable here. But note that Lexmark's technological and contractual "post sale" restrictions preventing the reuse of discount toner cartridges were not considered illegal, even if their patent rights were considered exhausted after the sale.

Game consoles are for entertainment. Phones run our lives. There is a difference in practice, though perhaps not in theory.

I’m not really aware of any console manufacturer other than Nintendo that spends as much effort trying to prevent me from doing that.

Generally I don’t want to do it with my console either, as I explicitly buy it to play games. The same thing is not true for my phone, which is very much a general purpose device.

Maybe it shouldn't be true for every video game console.

But even then --- a mobile phone has analogues with other computing devices that are more open.

Video game consoles shouldn't be locked down either.

In the case of game consoles though, they're essentially general purpose PCs that are sold to under cost with the expectation that they'll make their money back on game sales. I think that's a fair assumption, and of course if game consoles weren't locked down it would open the doors for people to get x compute power for less than it would be worth otherwise.

Whether you agree with that model or not, it's definitely different than the iPhone model where you are paying full price for the hardware, but are limited in what software you can run on it.

Nintendo tends not to sell their consoles at a loss. People criticize them for using older hardware but they make a profit on every unit sold plus their first party titles drive the console sales to a large degree.

If Microsoft and Sony could no longer take a cut of all software sales like Apple does, they’d simply be forced to adapt their business model, perhaps to something similar to Nintendo’s. Gamers would either have to pay full price for modern hardware (less volume discounts) or otherwise settle for older parts. Microsoft and Sony would have to focus a lot more on bringing top developers in-house with exclusive publishing contracts. Life would go on.

Under cost? My understanding is that consoles cost MORE than an equivalent self-built PC, and that the expectation that sells them is the guarantee that the games will WORK. On an actual PC, there's no guarantee that any software works with your particular configuration. That is, consoles standardize system specs, and include a markup reflecting that.

> consoles standardize system specs, and include a markup reflecting that

That's an interesting take that I didn't consider - that console manufacturer can charge money for the guarantee that the games will work.

However, from a quick google, two sites [0][1] have tried to build a PC with the same specs as the PS4 Pro ($400) and came up to ~700.

[0]: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/we-built-a-pc-using-ps4-pr...

[1]: https://modcrash.com/the-ps4-equivalent-pc-build/

The difference with game consoles is that the main reason for locking them down is to avoid piracy rather than controlling what the user runs.

there were a time when game consoles were just a hardware that would run any cartridge that you inserted.

restricting what could run in it is recent.

These types of restrictions are all over the place, and I'm not sure if they're good or bad. TVs and audio-listening-devices come built-in with dmca protection, meaning you can't watch pirated footage or listen to pirated music even though you own the device. Is that good? Is that bad?

That's bad, 100% bad. My TV does not need to be playing detective and monitoring every use of it. My car doesn't prevent me from exceeding the speed limit, not does it report me to authorities if I do.

Give it a few more years.

I suspect this was a bit of a throwaway comment, but ...

“EU ruling means speed limiters will be mandatory in the UK [and EU] by 2022“

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/mandatory-spe...

I did think we had a few more years :/ thanks for letting me know though.

How would a TV know it's being sent something pirated? I can't find a source on this.

I'm not aware of any such devices? I believe you have that backwards - many (most?) devices support HDCP, a form of DRM (and thus legally protected against reverse engineering by the DMCA). This is supposedly to prevent you from pirating (ie copying) otherwise legally purchased content.

In other words, the claimed motivation is to prevent you from running off a copy of whatever you happen to be streaming from Netflix. In reality though it doesn't seem to be very effective, leaving me wondering why so much time and effort is invested in it.

Not really. After the Atari generation, Nintendo released the NES which was locked down to prevent developers from selling games without paying them first. So regardless of where you were selling your game if it ran on NES then Nintendo got a cut. At first that cut was small but when that market grew they jacked up the percentage enough to cause some arcade manufacturers to leave the home console market for years.

Your game console isn't a pocket-sized multi-purpose computing device with a camera, GPS and more...

Some of them are that and more.

I don't check my console 75 times a day.

There are no studies that demonstrate the absolute ubiquity and irreplaceable nature of a gaming console; there are for phones.

I don't order a pizza with it. Or check my email. Or call Uber. Or read HN. Or take pictures of my kids. Or make phone calls. Or check social media (well... I don't... but over 3 billion do). Or...

There's a way that a "smart phone" (more accurately, a palm-sized computer that happens to make phone calls) is a general computing device - and a critical component of modern life in Western civilization -- that a gaming console is not.

You might not do it, yet all of that has been possible with handhelds for the last 15 years.

Yeah but you would have been on your own. It was never as ubiquitous as it is today. The real world is now very much living on server farms+mobiles, more than ever before.

All this seems like such an immature pointless argument.

in fact i'm going to stop wri

A game console is not a general-purpose computer.

What is the definition of "general purpose computer"?

One that is advertised as not constrained to a single genre of use. Game consoles are for entertainment. Consumption. That's why I can say "game console" and you know exactly what I'm talking about. Smartphones are for anything and everything. "There's an app for that."

Not a legal classification.

I'm making a moral argument, not a legal one. Legally Apple can do whatever they want and I give Epic's lawsuit a very low chance of doing anything at all.

I can make calls from my xbox. I can create and upload content. Check the weather...

Neither are phones.

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