Do You Own What You Own? Not So Much Anymore, Thanks To Copyright

from the a-disaster dept

Do you own the things you own? No, that is not a riddle being served up by the Cat in the Hat. Nor is it a rhyme spoken by the Lorax -- after all, he speaks for the trees, not for copyright laws.

It seems like every week there is a debate about a new topic involving ownership rights. Consumers are engaged in a constant tug of war with rights holders over what they can do with the products that they already purchased from them. A wide array of questions has confused the understanding of fundamental issues such as when people can resell or repair the things that they bought. The First Sale Doctrine stipulates that a rights holder is no longer entitled to control the distribution of a good once it has gone through a legitimate first sale. However, recent technological developments have created a new disagreement to this long-standing law -- do people ever actually own the things that they purchased? Were the products ever truly sold to them, or is everything instead just a temporary lease?

Take the recent debate over Nest products. Nest is one of the leading companies in "smart" thermostats for personal use. These products utilize a variety of light, sound, and heating sensors to automatically regulate the climate in a home and increase energy efficiency. Back in 2014, Nest purchased a company named Revolv that also made "smart" thermostats and proceeded to continue selling them for $300 each.

This once promising acquisition soon turned into a highly publicized controversy when Nest recently announced that it would be disabling the Revolv product line. At first glance this hardly seems worthy of news coverage. This is not the first time that a company has decided to suspend sales and maintenance of an older product. For example, Microsoft stopped maintaining Windows XP and the Zune, while video game companies slowly stop making new products for their old systems (eg. Playstation and Xbox) upon the release of a new platform. The Nest case has become a lightning rod because as opposed to these examples, it's not just stopping the maintenance, upkeep, or the addition of new features. Nest will shut down the device entirely, rendering it as nothing more than a $300 doorstop.

How can a product that was purchased legally by a consumer be turned off by a flip of the switch by the company that sold it? The answer is as simple as it is troubling -- it is because that consumer does not in fact "own" the product. Yes, they own the physical device. But they only lease the software embedded inside the product that makes it go. And because this is a license, the company that made the product retains the right to shut it down. The product was not sold with any stipulation on the box that said that it carried this risk. A consumer would have to be a copyright lawyer to foresee this result.

Every day new telephones, watches, cars, books, and even household appliances like refrigerators are introduced into the market and have had a tremendously positive impact on our lives. An increasing number of products that did not contain any software five or fifteen years ago now do. As this trend continues to grow, the same phenomenon will grow with it. You will own less and less of your own products and will instead simply be leasing them. Maybe one day you will wake up and discover that you are out $300 because the company decides it would rather sell you a different product and shut yours down.
This is not just limited to electronic products. The use of a license to control the resale of a variety of other, totally unrelated products has also grown substantially. Sports teams like the New York Yankees, Golden State Warriors, and Minnesota Timberwolves have all started to use the very same tactic. You might buy a ticket to the event, but you can no longer freely sell it, donate it to charity, or give it to a friend like any other product that you would purchase. Teams are forcing ticket owners to either sell through a select service (of which they get a cut of the revenue), or get their tickets revoked. These services set a variety of economic controls, such as a pricing floor, in order to limit the ability of people to freely exchange the tickets that they lawfully purchased.

As technology continues to be intertwined with every day goods and services, we have to ask ourselves if we want to accept the erosion of our ownership rights. My organization, and those that we work with do not believe so, and will continue to fight to make sure that you do, indeed, own the things you own. A variety of large and small companies and associations have come together to form the Owners' Rights Initiative. ORI has worked with members of Congress of both parties such as Blake Farenthold and Jared Polis in order to ensure the protection of every persons' ownership rights. They've introduced the You Own Devices Act, or, YODA, to ensure that essential software travels with the hardware you purchase. Representatives Farenthold and Polis are leaders in this arena, and ORI is working to build even more champions. Join us in the fight by contacting your Congressman and Senator and asking them to cosponsor YODA.

Lyle Gore is CEO of Ethos Dynamics, a technology reseller in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the past-President of the United Network of Equipment Dealers (UNEDA) and represents the organization on the Steering Committee of the Owners' Rights Initiative.

Filed Under: copyright, first sale doctrine, ownership, rights, software, yoda
Companies: owners' rights initiative

YODA Back, It Is: Law To Let You Actually Own Your Devices Even When Copyright Gets In The Way

from the a-good-start dept

Last year, we wrote about Rep. Blake Farenthold introducing a small, but important piece of copyright legislation, the You Own Devices Act (YODA), which just says that if you buy some piece of computerized equipment, you can sell it with any included software, without having to get permission from the software provider. As we noted, the reality is that this is just making it clear that the first sale doctrine applies to computer equipment too -- which shouldn't need a new law, but some tech companies (especially in the networking space) feel otherwise.

Farenthold has now reintroduced YODA, this time with Rep. Jared Polis as a sponsor as well (giving the bill that necessary "bi-partisan" shine). It's unfortunate that these kinds of bills are even necessary, but such is the state of copyright laws today, that they often mean the devices you buy, you don't even really own.

Also, kudos to Farenthold for playing on the YODA name in his tweet announcing the new version of the bill:

Filed Under: blake farenthold, copyright, devices, dmca, first sale, jared polis, ownership, software, yoda

Cory Doctorow To Push For Ending DRM

from the good-day-to-announce-this dept

This is Copyright Week, in which various people supporting more reasonable copyright laws highlight some of the problems with existing laws and important concepts that should be in copyright reform efforts. Today's topic is "you bought it, you own it," -- a concept that is often held back due to bad copyright laws. A few months ago, a bill was introduced in Congress called YODA -- the You Own Devices Act -- which would allow the owner of computer hardware to sell the devices with the software on it without creating a copyright mess. It was a small attempt to take back basic property rights from copyright law which often stamps out property rights. Hopefully, a similar bill will show up in the new Congress, and become law. Even better would be for copyright law to actually recognize true property rights, rather than limiting them at nearly every turn.

One of the biggest attacks on property rights and ownership is Section 1201 of the DMCA, better known as the Anti-Circumvention clause, that says it's against the law to circumvent any "technological measures" that were designed to block copying -- even if the underlying use is non-infringing. That is, if you break technological measures to access content that is not covered by copyright at all, you're still violating the law. This is the law that has made DRM so powerful, and which regularly removes your right to own what you bought. It's a blatant attack on basic property rights, and (even worse) has copyright maximalists pretending that their removal of property rights is actually a move in favor of property rights.

Thus, it's great to see the announcement today that Cory Doctorow is returning to EFF to help with its new Apollo 1201 Project, a plan to eradicate DRM in our lifetime.

"Apollo was a decade-long plan to do something widely viewed as impossible: go to the moon. Lots of folks think it's impossible to get rid of DRM. But it needs to be done," said Doctorow. "Unless we can be sure that our computers do what we tell them, and don't have sneaky programs designed to take orders from some distant corporation, we can never trust them. It's the difference between 'Yes, master' and 'I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT DAVE.'"

Doctorow has been speaking out on this issue for years. If you haven't watched his 2012 talk at the Chaos Communication Congress on the "war on general purpose computing," it's well worth your time. It's a discussion I've gone back to many times in the two and a half years since he first gave that talk. It highlights not only the absurdity of DRM in general, but why this is an issue that goes well beyond just the idea of locking down some content to protect an obsolete business model. As his speech noted, this is a battle over the right to actually own your computer and not to open it up to censorship and surveillance. The fight over DRM on content was just the beginning:

And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.

Filed Under: 1201, anti-circumvention, apollo 1201, apollo 1201 project, copyright, cory doctorow, dmca, drm, general purpose computing, yoda
Companies: eff

New Bill Designed To Stop Bogus Copyright Claims From Stopping You From Selling What You Own

from the you-own-devices-act dept

We just wrote about an audio equipment manufacturer trying to argue that it was criminal for someone to resell their products. While this was obviously crazy, never underestimate the lengths that some companies will go through these days to try to block people from selling products they (thought they had) legally bought. And guess what tool they're using to block you from actually owning the products you bought? Why copyright, of course. It's yet another example of how copyright is often used to block property rights rather than to create them.

This has become especially popular among telco/networking equipment manufacturers. These companies ship hardware with software included -- and then argue that you can't actually do anything with that hardware -- such as fix it or sell it -- without their approval, because doing so would violate their copyright on the software. Earlier this year, there was a big lawsuit in which Avaya had sued a company for copyright infringement for merely servicing Avaya equipment. Many other equipment manufacturers have terms of service or "transfer" policies that either effectively block such sales, or (more commonly) include a bunch of hoops that everyone has to jump through just to sell the products you thought you owned. All because of the software that comes with the hardware. While this has mostly been focused on big enterprise systems, it's not much of a stretch to think about how it might eventually apply elsewhere. With so many products being computerized these days, there will be software in lots of different hardware products -- and imagine the havoc those companies could create if they tried to block the sale of these products based on copyright.

Of course, as we've discussed for years, in copyright there's the right of first sale, which is supposed to let you sell your individual copy of a copyrighted work (it's why you can resell a copy of a book you own, for example). But many companies have been trying to chip away at that right, and at least some in Congress want to stop this practice. Rep. Blake Farenthold -- who I only just found out is an EFF member! -- has now introduced a new bill called the You Own Devices Act, or YODA. While I tend to hate silly names for bills, this simple bill is an important reminder that when you buy a product, even if it has copyrighted software included in it, you should own it. The key part of the bill:

...if a computer program enables any part of a machine or other product to operate, the owner of the machine or other product is entitled to transfer an authorized copy of the computer program, or the right to obtain such copy, when the owner sells, leases, or otherwise transfers the machine or other product to another person. The right to transfer provided under this subsection may not be waived by any agreement.

Realistically, this is just reinforcing the first sale doctrine, and it's ridiculous that it needs to be reinforced, but hopefully it can block out some of the questionable shenanigans by some companies.

The bill further makes sure that even if someone sells or transfers such equipment, that the new owners are still allowed to receive updates and security patches:

Any right to receive modifications to the computer program... relating in whole or in part to security or error correction that applied to the owner of the machine or other product... shall apply to the person to whom the machine or product and the copy of the computer program are transferred.

While it's ridiculous enough that this bill is even needed, it's nice to see at least some good copyright reforms popping up.

Filed Under: blake farenthold, copyright, equipment, first sale, ownership, property, property rights, resale, resellers, yoda, you own devices

Judge Used Real Courtroom Cases To (Secretly) Audition For TV Judge Job; Quotes Yoda To Defendant

from the snarkiness-for-the-camera dept

THResq has the story of a judge in San Diego, DeAnn Salcido, who apparently was interested in getting into the, apparently quite profitable, business of being a TV judge. So she had her bailiff's husband secretly videotape her in court presiding over various cases. Later, a TV producer asked to videotape another day and did so. Of course, she didn't tell others in the courtroom on the first day of filming (on the second day some were notified, others apparently weren't), and the Commission on Judicial Performance is somewhat understandably concerned that Judge Salcido may have put on more of a "show" than she normally would have, and that could have impacted how she handled the matters in front of her.

The complaint and her responses are below, highlighting pages upon pages of snarky statements that she apparently made in the courtroom, many of which the Commission believes are inappropriate. Judge Salcido does admit that a few are inappropriate -- such as telling one repeat offender: "What this means is don't come back before the court on another case ... 'cause you will definitely be screwed and we don't offer Vaseline for that." In another case, she asked a defendant if he was "a gambling man," when someone who had violated probation wanted to avoid going to jail. In one case, she went "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire," and told a defendant it sounded like he needed a lifeline, and asked him if he wanted to "poll the audience." Best of all? When a defendant told her he was "trying to show that I can do what I'm supposed to," she apparently went Yoda, and had the entire courtroom say aloud "Do or do not. There is no try." Her response to that was that it was a "teachable moments" that others could learn from. Now, it's entirely possible, as she suggests, that this is more or less how she always acts, but the fact that it was a (somewhat secretive) "tryout" for a TV job, it certainly calls into question what her motives were at times.

Filed Under: deann salcido, judge, tv judges, yoda