When do you own the gear you buy?

Two art­icles recently crossed my desk:

• Con­tent in lock­down — Tom Yager, InfoWorld.com
  I’m increas­ingly aghast at the erosion of the tra­di­tion­al free­dom we’ve enjoyed to do whatever we please with our per­son­al com­puters — but intrigued by the sci­ence behind it.
• Your Right to Repair — CAA Driver­’s Seat
  Ima­gine tak­ing your vehicle to your long-time inde­pend­ent ser­vice pro­vider only to be told he can­’t fix your car. You have to take it to a deal­er­ship because he can­’t access the repair information.

Both from com­pletely dif­fer­ent fields, yet both deal­ing with the same issue; your right to access the inform­a­tion on the hard­ware you’ve pur­chased. This is not a new issue, but these two art­icles, from dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives, seem to inter­sect at the same issue; your right to do what you want, with stuff you’ve bought.

At first glance, this does­n’t even seem to be an issue at all. You paid for the tech­no­logy, you should be able to do whatever you want with the tech­no­logy. To make a simple ana­logy, you buy the pie, you eat the pie, or share the pie, or throw it out.

Ah, yes, but the hard­ware developers would have you believe that the issue is really not that simple, with reas­ons like these:

• Yes, paid money and have the hard­ware in your pos­ses­sion, but what you really bought was a piece of paper with lots of leg­al text giv­ing you the right to actu­ally USE the hard­ware. And no, once you’ve used the hard­ware, you’ve impli­citly agreed to abide by the terms of the licence… which clearly state that you can only have the hard­ware ser­viced at a licensed ser­vice centre.
• The tech­no­logy in our hard­ware is super-secret. Only skilled, trained and licenced tech­ni­cians really know how to fix our tech­no­logy. Any­one else is just tinker­ing with your investment…and may actu­ally break it!
• We’ve inves­ted sig­ni­fic­ant research and devel­op­ment dol­lars in cre­at­ing your tech­no­logy. If we allowed any­one to access it, why, they could eas­ily copy it, or even make it bet­ter and com­pete with us.
• You’re a thief. You only want to use our tech­no­logy to copy the con­tent that our tech­no­logy presents. You want to take dol­lars away from our licenced ser­vice centres, our part­ners, and give it to oth­er pir­ates. To keep you from copy­ing our con­tent, we’re not going to let you access it, unless you can prove that you’ve paid a spe­cial fee to access it.

The list goes on, but you see the point. Hard­ware developers have inves­ted a sig­ni­fic­ant amount of money in product devel­op­ment. Soci­ety has allowed them to put in place leg­al mech­an­isms that keep you from fix­ing your own car, copy­ing your own video, or mak­ing your com­puter work better.

Per­son­ally, I’m on the side of openness…freeing up the sys­tems and hard­ware to the bene­fit of all. But (cue the poll) what do you think?

{democracy:7}

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Open Source, Licence, License, Author­isa­tion, Pir­acy, Copy, Con­tent