Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

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Eh, lots of potential future legal principles.

Right to repair. Hasn't happened because it's not a right yet.

Alternatively maybe anti trust, since using your monopoly on hardware to get a monopoly on software which is the essence of anti trust anyways. Hasn't happened because anti trust enforcement is really weak. Probably also doesn't force documentation.

Alternatively copyright and patent misuse, which is using your government granted monopoly on creating the exact hardware (copyright), or some of the features in the hardware (patents) to get a monopoly in an adjacent area (running software on that hardware) voiding the copyrights and patents. Hasn't happened because while the law exists (in common law) the courts apply it very conservatively. Also probably doesn't get documentation, just the right to run things on it.

Alternatively an interpretation of the quid quo pro of intellectual property (i.e. you disclose something in exchange for a temporary monopoly) being interpreted more strongly, such that you have to disclose the details of the internals to get intellectual property rights. Hasn't happened yet because today the quid quo pro isn't interpreted that strongly.

> Right to repair.

The interactions between a silicon chip and software drivers has nothing to do with right to repair. Never has been.

> Alternatively maybe anti trust, since using your monopoly on hardware to get a monopoly on software

Apple doesn't have a monopoly on any hardware, except insofar as any company has a natural monopoly on their own products, as made explicitly legal by copyright and patent laws.

Furthermore, one has to remember that there's a world outside of commodity PC hardware. The notion of hardware and software being separate is the rare exception, not the rule. Other than commodity PC computer hardware, nearly every product sold is both software and hardware bundled as a unit, with no marketplace expectation of end users replacing the software with an alternative. Whether you're talking about a car, washing machine, television, digital camera, microwave oven, garage door opener, CD player, indoor-outdoor thermometer, label printer, or an air conditioner, the software that comes with it is seen as part of the product.

In fact, this is even true for many computer components—companies like Nvidia aren't being any more helpful about their GPUs as Apple is with theirs.

Apple's computers straddle an interesting boundary between consumer devices and commodity PCs. But make no mistake, Apple isn't obligated to do anything here. You're not entitled to something because you want it.

> using your government granted monopoly on creating the exact hardware (copyright), or some of the features in the hardware (patents) to get a monopoly in an adjacent area (running software on that hardware)

Obviously legal. See above.

> Alternatively an interpretation of the quid quo pro of intellectual property

Obviously legal. See above.

> The interactions between a silicon chip and software drivers has nothing to do with right to repair. Never has been.

Software bugs... you could reasonably end up with a right to fix them given the current direction of right to repair lobbying. And that right might include the right to documentation.

> Apple doesn't have a monopoly on any hardware, except insofar as any company has a natural monopoly on their own products, as made explicitly legal by copyright and patent laws.

Which is to say they have a monopoly...

Anti trust never makes having a monopoly illegal, it makes exploiting that monopoly to gain further monopolies illegal. It doesn't care about where the monopoly came from.

It does care about the kind of monopoly, current anti trust rules probably don't consider the monopoly Apple has from copyright and patents on hardware to be of the right category (to cover an entire market)... but that could easily change.

> Obviously legal. See above.

On the contrary...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_misuse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_misuse

> Obviously legal. See above.

Yes, I agree under current definitions, but it would be a reasonable way for the laws to evolve. It is very similar in nature to the existing limits on patents, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/business/university-s-dru...

If apple were found to be in violation of Patent misuses the result would not be that apple is forced to open up the internals of how their products work but rather that patens apple has would be make null and void and others could copy them (based on the already public patent filling and nothing more).

Indeed, but if the doctrine started becoming more widely applied I imagine that they would start actively trying to avoid having it apply to them, e.g. by not using their hardware monopolies (patents) in ways that create software monopolies.

> Which is to say they have a monopoly...

Sure, but by that definition every commercial product constructed from multiple parts has a monopoly over all their components. Starbucks has a “monopoly” over what coffee is sold within Starbucks cups. Sorry, but I just can’t take that kind of argument seriously.

> current anti trust rules probably don't consider the monopoly Apple has from copyright and patents on hardware to be of the right category (to cover an entire market)... but that could easily change.

Copyright and patents are the very definition of a legal monopoly. I don't think you're being serious.

> Sure, but by that definition every commercial product constructed from multiple parts has a monopoly over all their components. Starbucks has a “monopoly” over what coffee is sold within Starbucks cups. Sorry, but I just can’t take that kind of argument seriously.

You're right, my reply there was poorly worded, fortunately you seem to agree with the point of the reply anyways since you say

> Copyright and patents are the very definition of a legal monopoly.

Which really is just the point.

However I am being entirely serious that there is more that not all monopolies implicate current anti trust law. Whether or not they do depends on whether or not they're a monopoly over the entirety of a market, not over a certain invention (patent) or copying a certain work of art (copyright).

You can see that at play in the current Epic v Apple case for instance. It's unambiguous that Apple has a monopoly over distributing apps to iPhones, it is ambiguous over whether the relevant market here is iPhone users, and therefore whether or not anti trust law applies.

> The interactions between a silicon chip and software drivers has nothing to do with right to repair. Never has been.

Well, that's perhaps because that interaction's importance for the functioning of ubuquitous things in life is a relatively recent thing. I don't understand why there's supposed to be some fundamental reason why we can't change our laws to encompass also the right to repair software, or to the right to repair the interactions between hardware and software. Sure, these things aren't rights today – but who's to say we can't make it so?

I didn’t say that new rights couldn’t be established in the future, only that Right to Repair does not now and has not in the past ever claimed to encompass a right to the source code of proprietary commercial software.

Probably also doesn't force documentation.

Samba was able to get documentation for SMB/CIFS this way.

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