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from the and-copyright-while-you're-there dept.
Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could allow companies to keep a dead hand of control over their products, even after you buy them. The case, Impression Products v. Lexmark International, is on appeal from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who last year affirmed its own precedent allowing patent holders to restrict how consumers can use the products they buy. That decision, and the precedent it relied on, departs from long established legal rules that safeguard consumers and enable innovation.
When you buy something physical—a toaster, a book, or a printer, for example—you expect to be free to use it as you see fit: to adapt it to suit your needs, fix it when it breaks, re-use it, lend it, sell it, or give it away when you're done with it. Your freedom to do those things is a necessary aspect of your ownership of those objects. If you can't do them, because the seller or manufacturer has imposed restrictions or limitations on your use of the product, then you don't really own them. Traditionally, the law safeguards these freedoms by discouraging sellers from imposing certain conditions or restrictions on the sale of goods and property, and limiting the circumstances in which those restrictions may be imposed by contract.
But some companies are relentless in their quest to circumvent and undermine these protections. They want to control what end users of their products can do with the stuff they ostensibly own, by attaching restrictions and conditions on purchasers, locking down their products, and locking you (along with competitors and researchers) out. If they can do that through patent law, rather than ordinary contract, it would mean they could evade legal limits on contracts, and that any one using a product in violation of those restrictions (whether a consumer or competitor) could face harsh penalties for patent infringement.
If you refill the ink in your printer cartridges, you will go to jail?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 23 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)
All levels of "rule by proxy" "elected officials" etc. can lead to nasty surprises.
I was pretty shocked at how sideways our HOA got when a few loose cannons got themselves elected - we were a self-governing group of 104 homes, but our charter basically put all decision-making power about the general fund (which was worth about 2 houses) in the hands of the elected board of governors. So, the clowns get in, extend their terms from 1 year to 2, then start entering the neighborhood into outside "management company" and others which both make life unpleasant for a majority of the homeowners and drain the general fund at a 25% higher rate than before, leading to an increase in dues, etc. etc. etc. I sold and left before the thing resolved itself, but it took almost a year to wake up enough homeowners to get them to realize what was going on.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @07:54PM
Essentially, these the problems your HOA had, and they are the problems that government has:
Now, your community has seen the problems, and has the opportunity to evolve a more robust framework for the interaction between community members; while a government, too, can evolve in a better direction, the key difference is that community members of an HOA can sell their stake and get the fuck out of there—not only is this difficult when a community is considered to be a "nation" (or when the world is considered to be composed of nations), but a government has access to so many resources that it can exist for a very long time in its corrupted, loathsome, failing status. There is no clean method by which to divest of the failing organization.