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Comment by prussian | Hacker News Reader

I want to add agreement to this, but to be more precise: people should own the things they buy and artificial (software ) means of locking people out of features shouldn't be allowed.

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The doctrine of first sale says that companies cannot restrict the second (or later owner) of a thing. You may notice that some books printed in the UK have some wording on the copyright page about how you can't sell the book (nor give it away) without requiring the subsequent owner to follow the same "license". In the US, I can give away a book, or sell it, and no condition that the publisher makes me agree to will apply to the next person.

Physical goods should be required to follow the doctrine of first sale. There should never be any possible conditions on subsequent owners. If the first owner "unlocks" a feature, it should be unlocked for every subsequent owner.

If you opt out of the heated seat package when you purchase the car, that doesn't mean the manufacturer can't add that hardware in a disabled state. That also doesn't mean you own the heating feature after you opted out

That's like asking Intel to fix a processor you overclocked

The far better analogy for what Tesla is doing is "it's like Intel preventing you from overclocking your chip". Sure, you should not expect support for your hacked seat warmers.

i came here to say this

If I paid them money and they gave me hardware (in this case a heated seat) then I can do what I want with it, sucks for them if they don't want me to. They can give me the non-heated seat. And yeah if I brick my car trying to jailbreak it that's on me, fine.

Nah, that's like asking Intel to enable two more cores on a two core processor made from a four core binned chip that they also sell four core processors based on. The only difference is software.

Intel briefly did have a scheme where you could pay to unlock parts of the processor that were disabled for segmentation reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service

It was abandoned due to backlash but that didn't stop Intel from doing artificial segmentation, so instead of buying a chip with "3MB" of cache and being able to unlock it to 4MB later, now you buy a chip with "3MB" of cache and 1MB of dark silicon that's permanently lasered off at the factory. I get the objections, but the alternative isn't really an improvement.

Here's an analogy: the year is 1950. I bought a car and a radio is built in. But I didn't pay the extra radio fee, so a wire is intentionally left out and the radio does not work. But the car is mine--I could choose to scrap it, radio hardware and all; I owe the company nothing, and I am the owner of a car with a nearly-functional radio. Then how could somebody object to my going in and fixing the radio, if it is my property to begin with?

The answer is: the year is 1950, and property rights are respected.

The year is 2023. The goal of Big Tech is the elimination of ownership and the rise of perpetual rental income.

Back then, the dealer would remove the radio before handing the car over to you. In its place would be a panel blocking the hole in the dashboard.

I used to work for a radio shop, and it was reasonably common for us to remove the radio when customers did not want it in their new car. Some wanted to have no radio for religious reasons, some businesses wanted the absolute cheapest vehicle possible for their employees, most wanted to install their own aftermarket radio.

Then they should pay me rental fees in compensation for electricity I have to purchase to haul their hardware around.

There are semantic games at play here, I suspect.

The manufacturer sold the hardware configured in a certain state; the same device could have been configured differently depending on price. Once the device is sold, the new owner is a petty tyrant over the state of his own property.

But if I don't own the heating "feature" (promise of a result), I don't care. I am pretty sure that the warranty indemnifies the company against the hardware actually being fit for said purpose and therefore will not guarantee a result anyway, so what do you "own" in the first place, if not the device itself?

[edit: grammar, readability]

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