I wrote this comment up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626193 but thought it was worth a dedicated discussion.
how would you legislate against this?
You don't deal with it by law. You deal with it by refusing to be treated like that - by physically destroying the device, if needed.
I think I would probably just put up with the 30 second punishment. But how would you legislate against it?
What law would it violate?
Youtube shows me the same ads hundreds of times (such as etoro ad). I didn't hate the ad to begin with but now I can only consider it a form of punishment to try to get me to sign up for youtube red. If it were normal genuine advertising there would be a rotation of advertisers. Nobody benefits from me having to see the same ad hundreds or even thousands of times.
What if a TV applied this to other product categories, things you bring into your home?
Where is the line?
By the way do you boycott youtube? Or just put up with the ads?
I don't think you smashed youtube when they started forcing ads on you.
So where is the line?
A machine is an extension of its owner. Whips, billy clubs, guns, and knives don't get into trouble when they're used to damage or kill people. The people that use them are. The same logic would apply here. Why wouldn't it?
In the end all laws that would apply in this situation (unless OP provides more information) already exist and have existed since the first written laws.
cheap ultra-hd TV. you can unplug it, doesn't have a battery. but if you don't unplug it it sounds an alarm if its camera is covered. if it sees a product competing with its sponsors, it punishes you by making you wait through a sponsorship punishment before watching whatever they're trying to watch. So if someone is out shopping and thinking about buying coke or pepsi then they will remember they have to sit through sponsorship punishments if they don't buy coke.
As for why people would put up with it: well, because the TV is cheap. Maybe they don't care that much about coke/pepsi (aren't that loyal.). Maybe the actual punishment is done locally, doesn't invade their privacy. you can always just unplug the tv if you are not willing to put up with the punishment delay.
I'm putting it in terms of punishment because I don't want to give marketers any ideas. (Obviously they would not call it a sponsorship punishment.)
People already put up with unskipable advertisements on youtube, for example.
You mention that a machine is an extension of its owner, but in this case the owner is the user but the software is run by another company. (the manuifacturer).
you mention whips and billy clubs: if a television had a robot arm and whipped or billy clubbed you, you could sue the company for personal injury.
but how about punishment advertisements? Can you sue them for emotional distress? Anything else?
What makes this different? On what grounds would it be illegal specifically? (You mention "all laws already exist" but you don't mention any.)
Your definition of punishment is odd to me. The barrier to entry seems spectacularly low. Watching advertisements, though universally loathed, is not actually punishment, by any broadly accepted definition. The generally accepted notion of a punishment, the important one here to our discussion, is an imposition that cannot be stopped.
If I get an unskippable advert on youtube I can always close youtube.
Nobody is forcing them to keep the TV, or even buy it in the first place. People would be up in arms quickly about awful TVs like that and nobody would buy them.
Those laws are assault and/or battery laws. Here's a clip from Hamurabi:
http://45338297.weebly.com/laws-on-assault-and-battery.html
Without doing any research I can guarantee you every Country has laws against assault. It's called the "Monopoly on Violence" and one of the most important cornerstones of civilization. Only the state can injure or murder people without repercussion.
There's no such thing as a punishment (in the literal sense) advertisement. It's fiction. See Black Mirror Season 1 episode 2, "Fifteen Million Merits".
I'd like to ask about this part:
"Nobody is forcing them to keep the TV, or even buy it in the first place. People would be up in arms quickly about awful TVs like that and nobody would buy them.
Those laws are assault and/or battery laws."
A loud noise isn't assault and battery.
You mention the possibility of "closing youtube". What if the television were "impossible" to close, had a battery long enough to punish you for a month even if you unplug it, and just would not stop playing an inconvenience noise until you did what it asked?
You mention nobody would buy it. Well, that is one possibility. However, I think people would buy it.
What law would a consumer device violate that the user couldn't practically open or disable, and which was partially subsidized by advertisements, and played an advertisement until the user bought the product advertised (a bottle of coke for example)?
What if it did so even when the user wasn't interacting with it?
You claim that nobody would buy such an ultra hd TV but I think some people would. What consumer protection laws would they violate?
If right now my TV turned on and played an advertisement, after receicing an over the air update from my wifi, how could I demand that the company turm this off if it was programmed not to and breaking its firmware is beyond my capability? Could I or a class of people sue the company under consumer protection laws? Would, indeed, they violate any consumer protection laws?
Indeed: if right now Samsung rolled out an update that turned on all their TV's, even if currently off, and played an advertisement, would they violate any law by doing so?
It is irrelevant whether they would want to do that (you say they would lose market share). My question is what law they would violate?
> My question is what law they would violate?
There isn't one. 'Abusive Advertising' (in quotes because it's not literal abuse, only annoying) is still completely legal and will be for the conceivable future as it's not actually assault or battery as those are covered under law and would be very poor advertising techniques.
> You mention the possibility of "closing youtube". What if the television were "impossible" to close, had a battery long enough to punish you for a month even if you unplug it, and just would not stop playing an inconvenience noise until you did what it asked?
Then people would throw them out, destroyed. The cost of creating an indistructable tv for advertizing doesn't make economic sense. Manufacturers and Advertisers want to make as much money as possible so they make things cheaply. Cheaply made things are easy to destroy.
Imagining technology that doesn't exist is future telling and science fiction. And that's the realm of literature. If you're looking to write this into a story of yours you'll want to check out :
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/
> What law would a consumer device violate that the user couldn't practically open or disable... until the user bought...
I'm pretty sure no such law exists, nor is there any process to enforce such behaviour nor test if it had occurred. It would require such a totalitarian state that there'd be no money for such a thing. Totalitarian states tend to be rather poor as they have chased away (or killed) their smart and/or productive people and left the powerful economic engine of freedom to cool and decay.
Dude. You seem very motivated, but also naive about the subjects you're questioning namely: human behaviour, marketing, advertisement, and consumer protection law. Which is fine, we can't learn unless we question what we know and don't know.
To satisfy your curiosity (if you're looking for practical knowledge, not just writing fiction) you'll want to do some work yourself ...
(the time lines are just guesses depending on the density of research necessary to understand the subject)
1) Talk to a one or many consumer protection lawyer/s about these questions of yours. Finding one that will humour you might be an adventure. (2+ hours?)
2) Do some research into the history of advertising. Maybe start with biographies of couple famous advertisers or marketing gurus. (16+ hours of research)
3) Do some research into the history of consumer affairs laws. (4+ hours of research)
And last, but not least...
4) Do some research into human behaviour (at least 100+ hours of work). A couple fantastic authors are: Robert Sapolsky, Jordan Peterson, Dan Ariely. They all have several books about the subject and LOTS of youtube lectures.
I wish you the best of luck on your pursuit of knowledge!
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Which too, is entirely unhinged and impossible.
But I can't play mouse-clicky games. They bore me to tears and my RSI flares up.
The book was worth reading as were the 2 follow on books.
Thanks for the link!
Therefore it will be fine as long as all punishment is self inflicted and you always have the ability to just ignore it or turn it off.
Illegal on what grounds though? What law would it violate?
Edit: of course it should be illegal! But how can we make it illegal? Or is there any law already?
In the annals of technocracy, people can't stand politics anymore and so they send their toasters and refrigerators to do all that. These appliances can not be bought and become capable politicians. Machines pay taxes and the hirachy of ownership, human owns machine, is still clear but the dominance hirachy becomes more and more unclear.
Here the toaster can become the president, but he is still send away from his human who could be on the lower end of society. Of course every human is on welfare paid by the machines and everyone is happy in the technocratic society, until the human machine integration takes of and existenz becomes an inconceivable horror.
So the owner of the machine has to be responsible of the machine or the technocracy goes rogue and enslaves humanity. Then owning or instructing the enslaver device can be made illegal. Even if your toaster decides to enslave humanity, you will have to answer for it, even if you don't care or never bothered with it. You willingly gave it your political powers and it operates in your absence on your behalf. Not even death can eliviate you from this responsibility and with machine integration death isn't even an option anymore.
But we missed our chance of Technocracy and powered unhinged through all industrial revolutions. Machines don't have to pay taxes for their labor, but they have become employers already. We lost the ability to pin this on the owner. All liability is transfered to the user and nobody owns the company or the machine anymore.
The user agrees to the conditions and takes over all liability.
So by agreeing to use the enslaver you will enslave yourself. If this is forbidden by law, you are breaking that particular law.
I don't see a way around it.
If I keep you handcuffed then I am criminally responsible, not the handcuffs.
If you use a machine/tool/system to keep someone in servitude, or imprisoned, or whatnot, you are the one committing a criminal offence, not the machine.
For that to change we would probably need (a) fully autonomous AIs, and (b) that these AIs and society have reached a state such that these AIs are legally no longer considered as machines but effectively as human beings/individuals.