We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership • Hacker News Board

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#241

Post by LLWM » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:55 PM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #224

mathattack wrote: post #211

What's really wrong with this? As a provider of goods or services, I should have the right to say, "I'm only renting you this, not selling it to you. If you want to buy it, go see someone else." If I build a house, I should be able to rent it out, and not sell it if I want to keep it. If the market demands builders to sell it, some will find a way. There's no intrinsic right to forcing people to have an option to buy…

> What's really wrong with this? As a provider of goods or services, I should have the right to say, "I'm only renting you this, not selling it to you. If you want to buy it, go see someone else." ... It's a good question, but an important consideration is whether your customer has the option of saying no. For example, if you are a small farmer, you can't really negotiate with tractor manufacturers because you lack t…

Just because you want an option doesn't mean you should get it. Sometimes (most of the time) what this weirdo wants is completely unreasonable. For example, how is a cell phone going to contact a tower without giving away its location, if for no other reason than it can only contact towers within a certain limited distance?

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#242

Post by incongruity » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

chacham15 wrote: post #162

apricot wrote: post #48

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights. As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them. When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms. I remember reading Stallman's sh…

The real problem here isnt that we're leasing things (we have leases for cars, houses, and many other physical goods). The problem is that the manufacturers mix leasing and owning. I.e. you own the device, but lease the software. I think that everyone would be radically happier if you either leased everything or owned everything. This is partly because when we buy something at a store, we expect to own it, not own pa…

The question I have is what does ownership mean if the thing owned is useless without something that cannot be owned/must be leased and cannot be replaced?

Can you say that it's really owned if you can't separate the leased part and can't use the thing without the leased part?

I mean, sure, you're free to write any sort of contract you want, free market yadda yadda, but I think there's something meaningful in the point the article makes here...

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#243

Post by AnimalMuppet » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #215

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If I buy a book, I can write on the pages. I can fold, spindle, and mutilate. I can rip out a page. I own that book. I can't sell a copy, though - not even a copy of my modified, ripped up version. Not without a license from the author/publisher of the original.

John Deere would say that you can reflash, smash, or replace the eeeprom if you want. But you can't create a new piece of software based on the old one. I think you should be able too, because what is the harm, but I don't think the book analogy holds. You aren't allowed to rewrite a book, even if you keep the copy yourself.

If I understand correctly, yes, you absolutely are allowed to rewrite a book if you keep the copy yourself.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#244

Post by mwfunk » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

apricot wrote: post #48

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights. As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them. When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms. I remember reading Stallman's sh…

Yeah, I remember back before ebooks, we could all just Xerox the books we owned, bind them together, and sell or give away the copies to anyone we wanted to, and they could do the same. It was a lot more work than just copying a file, but everyone was perfectly fine with people doing it.

Oh wait a minute, that's not at all what it was like. It's very easy to latch onto people like RMS who make everything seem so black and white, especially when they're older than you and can remember the "good old days" when everything was more civilized. These are all critical, important, vital issues that people should not let go of for one second and never stop thinking about. It's just unfortunate when people like RMS want to turn it into some grand good vs. evil narrative (frequently in which they see themselves in the hero/prophet role). It frames everyone with a differing or more nuanced opinion as someone who is not operating in good faith, which is just never good for anyone.

I don't think there's a person alive today who has all the answers about this stuff. There may not even be a correct or true or proper answer given the ways in which we've framed the debate, only a pseudoinverse solution that makes everyone the least unhappy on the whole. But we're long past letting any one person with their very, very, very specific ideology define that debate. I worry like hell about all this stuff, but the people going around saying "See?!? RMS was right!!!" might be counterproductive. It twists the debate back into "you're either with RMS or you're against him", and whatever his other good qualities may be, that's a tough pill to swallow for just about everyone. He approaches everything in the most fundamentalist way possible, which I've come to see as a sign of intellectual conceit rather than conviction.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#245

Post by orbitingpluto » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

Let's go reduction ad absurdum with this:

Imagine that this also applies to medical equipment and that you do not own your own mechanical heart beating in your chest. Furthermore, only franchised doctors will be allowed the encryption key to tweak your heart settings.

Will the company that provided you with your heart reserve the right to terminate the software license, and consequently your life, at will? Will they be allowed to stop tweaks of the software that could save your life? Will the unfranchised paramedic be legally forced to not save your life because to do otherwise would result in a DMCA violation?

Another point is that what if everything goes to hell? What if all of our tools are worthless as soon as communication infrastructure goes down? Imagine having the landscape littered with machines so productive as to easily end oncoming starvation while we pull plows with our bare hands. Short term gain for long term misery.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#246

Post by Loughla » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #212

bryanlarsen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that 1668 acre farm is not a corporate farm, it's a family farm run by a single operator without hired hands.

May still be corporate, because corporations are a way of structuring a business, not an indication of how large or how many people are involved with the business. I expect most family farms are also corporations or even multiple corporations.

No. Most family farms, at least in my part of the states, are not corporations. They are small businesses in that they have some tax exemptions for being farms, but they are not incorporated.

Only the 'slick' farmers (you know, them city folks) or large businesses that are 'family farms' in name only are incorporated.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#247

Post by sanderjd » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

cylinder wrote: post #63

sanderjd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder whether the legal framework for software has ended up different than other things because of its fundamental differences, or whether it's because it was invented in a different era. Is it software that is different or is it the modern legal structure that is different?

Nothing has changed, licenses have always been in the law.

Probably wasn't very clear – I wasn't trying to say anything about actual legal changes (although that's interesting too), I was wondering if instead legal culture has changed. I'm wondering if there's any fundamental difference between machines and software that causes the former to be predominantly owned while the latter is predominantly licensed, or whether it is instead because software is coming of age in a different legal and/or political and/or economic ecosystem. Or perhaps machinery went through a similar phase where licenses were more common – I have no idea if that's the case, and I'm curious to know.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#248

Post by declan » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #230

declan wrote: post #173

The linked article is good as far as it goes, but it fails to take the next logical step and call for the simple repeal of the anti-circumvention section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today. It was sold to Congress as a non-contr…

> I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today. I shake my head at this. Everybody in tech with 2 brain cells predicted this. The DMCA isn't buggy. It is functioning precisely as designed--protecting big businesses.

>Everybody in tech with 2 brain cells predicted this.

Cite, please? Claiming, somewhat rudely, that was the case doesn't make it true.

If you were prescient enough to publicly criticize the anti-circumvention sections of the DMCA in 1996-1997, you were virtually alone. The lone voices of criticism I remember came from the American Library Association and American University's Peter Jaszi. By 2000 or so, sure, some people had realized the problems, but what I'm talking about is what happened before 1201 became law.

Here's one example: the DMCA was approved by both chambers of Congress and became law in October 1998. EFF's home page in October 1998 doesn't even mention the votes or the DMCA at all: https://web.archive.org/web/19981201054106/http://www2.eff.o...

Of course, the EFF has arguably done more than any other single group to fix DMCA 1201 since then. But, again, I'm talking about when the legislation was still in Congress.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#249

Post by LLWM » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #234

Why do people farm? John Deere owns your tractor. Monsanto owns your seed. The Bank owns your farms.

Why do people develop software? Your employer, assuming WFH, owns the software you write. Microsoft owns Visual Studio. Amazon owns the AWS servers.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#250

Post by freehunter » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 6:06 PM UTC

cbd1984 wrote: post #142

fennecfoxen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to help poor people eat, you should give poor people money to help them eat, rather than paying farmers to make one specific type of farming easier and distorting the market to artificially favor something that's actually less efficient (and may have all sorts of crazy side effects on the rest of the world). Favoring direct intervention to fix the actual problem should be axiomatic, really.

> If you want to help poor people eat, you should give poor people money to help them eat The more food we can make per unit resource, the more food we have, given that resources are finite. Giving the poor more money does nothing to change that.

At this point we're producing more food in the US than we need to feed the population of the US. That's why we can divert portions of our food production to non-food products like plastic or fuel. The problem has always been and will always be making sure everyone has enough to eat, and the biggest problem there is not everyone has enough money to afford even the cheapest, nastiest food. Giving the poor more money might not be the only or even the best answer, but it is an answer.

No one in the US is starving because we can't produce enough food. People starve because their access to the food is artificially hindered. In fact, we're producing so much food the the US government pays farmers to not produce food so that prices will remain high enough to make a profit.