1. Update the laws so that the shenanigans of the companies are finally named as they are:
- Retroactively removing a feature is stealing from the owner.
- Deleting bought digital content is also stealing from the owner.
- Spying on a user is an unlawful search.
2. Make these transgressions be investigated by the prosecutor's office, so that a citizen only needs to report it to them and not figure out how to get a class lawsuit going. This will allow security researchers to do their job.
3. Classify devices with unpatched and unpatcheable security bugs as "unfit for use" and eligible for a full unconditional refund, and extend warranties on them to, say, 15 years.
4. Obviously, make any kind of security research legal and protected from intimidation by the companies.
Other approach, only huge companies start making devices because medium size companies cannot take the risk of the refunds.
Users are worse off, companies are worse off everything with the outlined rules is worse. Making law is hard.
The fundamental problem lies here: you haven't actually bought anything useful. You didn't buy content, you bought a license, and that license is merely "you might be able to view content in a very specific way for an unspecified amount of time that is completely at our discretion".
You still have what you bought when they revoke the license, it's just in a different and less useful state.
That whole system needs to be crushed into dust to make a real difference. Make it so that buying a license to content isn't a thing - that you are now actually buying content - and all of the things that come with ownership will follow.
But I don't see any viable path to that happening. A sightly more possible outcome would be to have a minimum standards/requirements for digital content purposes - a set of required rights/restrictions/components for any digital purchase the all licenses must incorporate or cannot compromise on.
This is a very powerful yet very dangerous train of thought. Modifications to the concept of property were at the heart of the way communism has been implemented in the USSR, and it led to awful results.
You might have a different goal in mind, but so did many of those involved in the October revolution.
There is a contest between scarce rights and non-scarce rights. At the moment, developed-world nations default to a position where non-scarce rights overrule scarce rights.
Example 1. Consider your ownership of a computer. A computer is scarce property. In a regime that respects only scarce rights, you could do what you like with it. In the regime that runs developed countries at the moment, there are all kinds of things we cannot do with it due to "intellectual property" rights. If you paid a company for some software in the past, you cannot do maintenance work on that software because the person who wrote it own the copyright to it. Even though you own a hard disk, you are not allowed to make copies of bits on that disk that are held to be copyright-protected. There are non-scarce things you are not allowed to distribute, non-scarce things you are not allowed to bundle, legalese garbage you have to pay lip-service to, etc.
Example 2. Imagine you manufacture mobile phones. One day you get a nastygram from a competitor who says that you are infringing on their patents. You send your team to look into it. They learn that years ago this competitor was able to secure patents on some basic techniques. In some places, patents have been granted on some things that are fundamental - it is not clear whether it would even be possible to operate in the domain without using these approaches. Your engineering team unknowingly reimplemented those same ideas from first principles while they were building the phone. You are left with a choice - 1. pay up; 2. try to appeal the patent (good luck training a non-technical judge or jury in this highly complex domain to a standard so they can reject the patent); 3. find a way to achieve outcomes without infringing on the patents. Again - non-scarce rights are severely impacting your reasonable use of scarce property. (In a scenario similar to this, Intel failed in the mobile phone space a few years back despite strong support from Apple. Quallcom has very strong patent coverage in that space.)
By law you own the metal and silicon that is in front of you. Yet there are all of these laws that prevent you from making free use of it, with each of them being grounded in somebody else's non-scarce "property" rights. How did this come about? About a century ago, governments started changing the concept of property from what everybody had understood it to be for thousands of years (scarce goods) to the arbitrary "bundle of rights" definition, and begun attaching the benefits of property to things that were not scarce. Then trade agreements were used to establish these as international standards.
Above you said that I was proposing a dystopia. Not so. The dystopia is what we have now.
A constitutional limitation of property rights to scarce property should strongly strengthen scarce property rights over what we have at the moment.
Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad" doesn't help to improve the current situation, neither does abolishing it. The way I see it, there's definitely reason in protecting ideas and the result of creative work, even if that result is a sequence of bytes. Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.
That's not to say the current situation is ideal – far from it. But I strongly believe your suggestion would lead to chaos, and it's dangerous to go there.
I made this case in the grandparent post. To reiterate: the presence of scarce and non-scarce property rights creates a contest between two things that we pretend to be the same thing (property) but which follow different dynamics (scarce vs non-scarce). Government must rule that one dominates the other. In the developed world, the way this plays out is that government rules non-scarce rights to overrule scarce rights. Removing the non-scarce rights would therefore lead to a strengthening of scarce rights.
> Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad"
But that is not what I did. I made a first-principles argument, and then supplied examples as a form of illustration.
You have quoted "bad" here as though I said it, though I did not.
> Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.
(heavy edit)
There was incentive to create in the pre-scarce world. Large bodies of great work were produced in theatre, chamber music, literature, sculpture, painting in a scarce-rights world with much lower GDP, lower living standards and no copyright. Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Chekov - these people all operated in scarce-rights regimes. People routinely copied their works. That we have these works is evidence of their incentive.
The licenses that sit behind Linux and similar systems go to great lengths to cancel protections given by copyright. Yet great work is done on these systems. The incentive must be there.
Non-scarce rights create incentive against creation. They discourage remixing of existing work, and they create legal barriers against entry into fields that are affected by patents.
Revoking the right to own things and transforming almost all private property to public goods is an extreme measure and almost certainly leads to some kind of fascist regime to enforce and maintain it.
The law I proposed has to be working against governments and semi-government institution such as banks, not about random Joes.
The firmware question is interesting, because there is no such thing as FLOSS hardware except of some low-end microcontrollers, thank you for noticing.
The most decent way of achieving this state seems like to prohibit only import of new devices and don't even bother about user's ones or anything second-hand. I have an observation that if you have 2 identical laptops but one with Nvidia/Amd and one with Intel HD then the former laptop will die naturally, such as any laptop with Ati today, while the latter laptop keeps serving until the physical death. You can install Ati driver for Windows 7 but can not for Windows 8 and never; also proprietary Ati driver fails to work with modern Linux stack while free Ati driver uses to much energy to consider the device as a laptop. This is an example of natural death of proprietary hardware/software, just stop import new proprietary devices.
Any authorities checking user devices for anything is a way of tyranny/authoritarism/totalitarism, nowadays the governmenns are working into totally another way, elusive to see for us the adults. In XXI governments use to propagate this or that ideas in schools. Teach them to have their fun and games in GNU/Linux distros and prohibit teachers to propagate Microsoft, Zoom, Viber, Google without restricting usage of these service for leisure. When the proprietary devices will start begging to buy a new hardware but it will not be available inside of the country then we will found ourselves in a new world.
> Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use?
There is no such thing in XXI as an independed government without a large dev team.
Could you imagine the gigantic amount of flow of money that goes into Microsoft enterprise and Office support instead flowing into open source? And the amount of bug that amount of eyeballs would catch.
Both the Linux desktop and things like LibreOffice would see meteoric improvements within the year.
Right now there is already some chances budding (in Spain’s regional governments, Munich, France’s military), it just needs to be pulled together into a comprehensive plan and get a good push.
But what's far more important (and practical) than mandating libre software is mandating libre file formats, and this is what we've seen happen somewhat successfully around the world: governments requiring official documents to be primarily available in PDF/A and/or OpenDocument (c.f. OpenOfficeOrg/LibreOffice) instead of (say) MSFT's Office OOXML formats.
in europe on the other hand the issue is entirely political. a city switches to linux. when the leading party changes it switches back because microsoft promises some benefits like jobs or worse kickbacks, or the new leader is simply ignorant and actually believes that windows is better.
In short, the first thing you need is people who care about their countrymen. People often propose ideas that start from an assumption that politicians want to make the World better, but the ones in power in the UK at least are more motivated by other things: greed for example.
We need a figure head with a strong moral and ethical compass who lives in private as if they are in public. Whom is capable of addressing all situations with grace, elegance, respect, compassion, and humility in that order only in reverse. One whom is frugal, well read, and courteous. One whom in being frugal is able to think of all and is able to stand fast in the face of corruption as they deep down truly experience the interconnectedness of life and by proxy society… and through experiences, travels and interactions has attained a working understanding of the all pervasive ripple effect.
Oh yeah, and this person has to be willing to martyr themselves as the public life sucks!
It’s a tall ask but someone embodying those traits would scoff at the notion of wanting, let alone keeping power!
If you’d like to see what federated horizontal power structures with consensus decision making looks like and how it feels to participate in I challenge you to join a local planning commission in your city if you haven’t already and if you live in america of course…