Ownership is a bad framework for this issue—it’s too ambiguous. You can “own” a vehicle all you want, that doesn’t give you the right to fuck with its odometer or catalytic converter.
Sure it does.
This entire attitude is what's scary about software, actually. See, back in the ye olden days, no one disputed your right to remove the catalytic converter on a vehicle you purchased.
It was no longer legal to drive and if you were caught you could get fined. But you absolutely had the right to do it.
But now with software, there's enough control that 3rd party entities are dictating with 100% success what an owner can do with the vehicle. And you're defending it as right.
Your key term here is control. When discussing a new rule, that is what you focus on. Use the word ownership when selling the rule, sure. My point is rules drafted starting from ownership tend to be trivial to circumvent. Because they presume ownership is a natural state when it is a social construct.
you purchase a video game from your religious friend and they decide you shouldn't be allowed to play the game between 8pm and 8am and they have the ability to ensure you can't.
their ability to limit you isn't a social construct, it's as strongly bound as physical violence, and that's the problem.
Where? When?
Say you own private property and a car. Does that mean you are allowed to leak diesel all over it? Most jurisdictions say no, in part because that affects your neighbours’ property values.
Ownership is not, and has never meant, absolute sovereignty. It’s a package of rights defined in terms of control. When we’re discussing amending what ownership means, giving the owner more control, it’s circular to start with ownership: you can do it. But it’s much more meaningful (and powerful) to talk about control.
Tesla is not the government. Toyota is not the government.
stop it.
I’m trying to avoid the miasma of conflicting rights. Somewhere in this thread I referenced a car spilling diesel on private land. This impact the value of neighbouring plots. On entirely private merits, the owner’s ability to operate their property, on their property, willy nilly, is curtailed.
Simpler, if more absurd example: someone’s pet or kid wanders on your property. This curtails what you can do, with your property on your property. You own both. But you don’t control everything which happens upon it.
Seizing on this distinction is immensely clarifying. It’s the difference between talking about computers in general and knowing the protocols.
I, and many others, disagree and think that's a heinous abuse despite the argument that both parties willingly entered into the agreement.
This is a total non sequitur. (And sure, if both participants are wealthy institutions and knowledgeable and uncoerced.)
There is no world in which two institutions with plenty of money, knowledge, and a lack of coercion are going to come to an agreement for a loan with 50% interest.
Theory vs practice. In theory what you're saying could happen, in practice it's only going to happen when one party has a severe imbalance against the other party (and you know this or you wouldn't have tried to head off that argument). Since contract law deals with practice, contract law disagrees with your assessment that it should be allowed.
Which goes back to the whole ownership thing.
Just because someone _can_ draw up a contract to muddy ownership to the point that the seller of a $30k+ USD vehicle can retain control and absolutely limit what the purchaser can do does not mean contract law should allow it.
And there's too much precedence for this sort of thing for you to have a leg to stand on (although I'm sure you'll try). Just because someone _can_ sign a non-compete with no expiration does not mean the law should allow it.
ad nauseum.
Arguing that because contracts today muddy ownership so you can't act as if the purchaser has certain rights is missing the point.
You should own your car and be able to do as you wish. You should also be able to turn on or off any tracking. There are just consequences for some of the things you might want to do.
Ownership is a legal concept. What it means, what that package of rights tied to a piece of property entails, is entirely dependent on the law. Using ownership as a guideline for rule-making is bad form because it’s tautology; I can justify and condemn anything on the basis of my or adjoining persons’ purported ownership rights.
The machine languages of ownership are control and possession. That’s what we’re delineating, and unfortunately it generally must be done piecemeal. In this case, the pieces are the data cars beam home. Currently, the manufacturer controls it. You and I agree—I think—that it should be the user, which we—by this conjecture—make its owner. The ownership flows from control, not the other way.
(The problem is trebled with cars given they’re typically driven on roads the driver doesn’t own nor control.)
Not really. The common definitions either fall back to control or invoke the term property, another legalistic word. What ownership means is incredibly fluid and context dependent; consider how ambiguous it is when it comes to its classic form, real estate.
how about "legal absolutism"? If it's not codified in law it doesn't exist and therefore cannot be a part of people's vernacular.
Once this takes over we can update all our dictionaries to stop marking specific definitions as being legal definitions as they'll all, by definition (heh) be the legal definition.
Or, to put it another way, this is the internet, where you're free to say whatever you want but that doesn't mean you'll be taken seriously.
Within the context of lawmaking, for social constructs like ownership, absolutely. It’s sort of like starting with legality when writing drug regulations; outside the lawmaking context, that makes sense, within it, it’s nonsense.
I’m not saying never use the word ownership in common parlance. But when discussing a new law, yes, it pays to be precise. Because starting from ownership will result in a law that is ineffective or misdirected.
> You should own your car and be able to do as you wish.
no "new law" was being discussed, you yourself tried to limit the scope to the legal definition and now you're trying to argue that no one should be discussing anything but the legal definition (well, for the second time, just with different words).
It's a normative statement. And I'm not solely talking legal definitions. But when we're debating the proper boundaries of ownership, it is tautological to invoke ownership in the definition.
The original phrase is stronger as "you should be able to do [with your car] as you wish." Which is not a commonly-held view even if we restrict ourselves to vehicles solely driven on private property--to the point of absurdity, you can't mow down pedestrians just because it's your car and land.
For example, you offer up that just because I own a car doesn't give me the right to murder people with it (stupid, but you went for it so let's roll with it). The level of control being exerted by software is such that I couldn't _stop it_ from happening regardless of my ownership status if a 3rd party decided it wanted my vehicle to murder people.
the ownership thing is a red-herring from someone who is trying really hard to be smart but they're missing the point entirely.
Put another way, It's the tail wagging the dog. "You don't _really_ own it, therefore 3rd parties have the right to exert that level of control over you" when what's being protested is the level of control being afforded 3rd parties. ownership is just the mechanism.
you can't legally create a contract that allows you to charge 50% interest on a loan. You shouldn't be able to create a contract that allows a 3rd party to dictate what you can, and cannot do, with a vehicle they sold you. That should remain solely in the hands of the government (which is why your car murdering people analogy was stupid).
For a long time this was just a fact of buying any car that lived long enough. I have bought several cars where the transaction went something like: "so the odometer has rolled over twice; so there's actually 376,000 miles on the frame... but only 118,000 of those are on this motor and I swapped the transmission with a reman 76,000 miles ago."
Of course we've added a few significant figures to odometers since then, and in the era of digital odometers I imagine "rolling over" behaves very differently. (Will the chassis survive 4 billion miles? Seems unlikely. Do the display and storage have different bit resolutions? Is it a saturating counter internally? Externally?)
Varies by state.