Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook - we power their abuses with our money. Just stop buying their trash. Support open hardware, free and open source software.
"They change it after selling it to you for the worse, don't buy their products."
When that becomes the reputation the problem will solve itself when they stop selling them from bad reputation.
In this "fully my property, not a service I'm using" framework, would an update that patches a security vulnerability be "altruism"? Would refusal on Google's part to patch vulnerabilities be a completely acceptable refusal to futz with someone's property?
This is a serious question; my perspective is that "I thought I was buying unchanging property" is disingenuous unless you're similarly surprised by app updates and maintenance (let alone feature development). The expectation of these updates makes it pretty clear to me that this resembles a service more than a static product that Google has ability to "vandalize" (or responsibility to maintain).
If they can't do that, then they need to stay out of the space.
(I know someone will say “just pirate it then!” but even putting moral obligations aside that’s still not realistic for the average viewer)
Argument 1: Sufficiently severe benefits should mitigate the moral fault in theft.
Argument 2: Sufficiently small damage should mitigate the moral fault in theft.
You both seem to at least implicitly agree that both is theft, which would be a traditional point of disagreement in the debate.
I commented because I think one and two might be structurally the same argument: It's a consequentialist idea of utility thresholds.
A key disagreement would be whether there are thresholds that make the quantitative difference in utility a qualitative difference. Think hunger on one side and unquantifiable small loss in profits on the other side.
Even for rocket engines or whatever, it’s not clear if the patent system is still producing acceptable returns.