But if anything, regular people should have more of the cake.
The courts assumed good faith with a licensing exception, and maybe it was. But that opened the door to essentially completely dismantle the first-sale doctrine. Get rid of that loophole and all this stupidity ends, immediately. Well that and the DMCA. Once you buy something, it's yours to do whatever you want to do with it short of replicating it for commercial benefit.
As a more specific way to do this, I'd like to see any software that hardware companies make for their own hardware designated (at the choice of the company) as either part of the hardware or a separate product. In the former case, it must be made available under GPLv3 with full anti-tivoization provisions. In the latter case, it must use only public and documented interfaces and must be completely realistic for another company to make a competing product on a level playing field. Ideally the separate products would also need to be highly cross platform if technically feasible where the burden of showing that it isn't is on the developer.
Informed consent goes a long way.
1: the exception that I'm thinking of here is fair phone, and it isn't much of an exception.
I.e. a warning would be if he didn't want it to happen, but my understanding is that he very much did.
And the people did rise up and successfully tried to fix the problem - there was a big socialdemocratic movement that culminated between the world wars.
What he underestimated was the ingenuity with which the capitalism reinvents itself (and creates new forms of private property to gobble up - free computing in RMS's sense just one example). He also overestimated ability of most people to understand the problem (it's lot more lack of emotional rather than intellectual capacity). I would say alienation is central to Marx, unfortunately alienated people can be so indoctrinated to fail to consider the alternatives. Most people seem to prefer to suffer through hardship rather than demand an alternative solution.
Those are the only checks of power on the executive built into our system. Are you expecting we would have to throw out our political system all together, get rid of the top by force, and start over?
The question that hasn't fully been worked is how to allow people to think/feel they own something, while having no actual legal rights to it. But, as we see, this is being worked on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
So it's actually far from trivial to draw a line.
Cargo van -> Camper van conversions go through this all the time - you add/remove seats, add a lot of weight in the form of beds, water tanks, etc. add/remove windows, put solar panels on the roof... After those changes you have to take it down to the vehicle inspection, and they tell you whether or not your changes have been deemed acceptable to drive on public roads.
In at least two european countries that I know of (but probably in all of them) cars need to pass periodic technical inspection to be allowed on the road. Breaks are tested, among other things.
Funny you mention the brakes, because a friend of mine told me just days ago that he used to change his own brakes consumables (pads) until the new car, which "throws an error" if you replace the part - you have to go to an official service office for the computer configuration.
Now, do not forget that the need for the intervention of third parties lowers the car reliability ("far away", "too expensive", "device too old", "operation failure", "inexperienced operator" etc.).
This should show that your argument has difficult sides. Of course you should be able to act on your critical possessions. It should be within a good framework, but it should be fully, practically possible.
That is a nonsensical argument.
"You shouldn't be able to put anyone else in danger" - agreed.
"You shouldn't be able to modify your car" - wtf does that have to do with danger?
"Modifying brakes (not breaks)" is not the same thing as "Putting people in danger". Sometimes we modify them to have better braking than the standard.
What countries actually do is test the end-result, i.e. Does the car conform to the legally mandated required braking performance?
Rather than campaign to stop people from owning property anymore, maybe just enforce the existing laws (which, as far as I know, are enforced already anyway).
This campaign to divide people into an owning class and a servile class is pretty damn repugnant, and "Because someone can be harmed if we allow people to own things" is just the new "But think of the children" nonsense.
Say you put aftermarket brakes on your car and they fail, causing an accident that harms someone else. The person who changed their brakes should be held liable legally, its as simple as that. Owners that choose to change their car and do a piss poor job of it are held accountable for their actions and others considering similar modifications can choose to learn the lesson.
Yes that means people could be harmed in the process, but regulations themselves harm people too. There's no way around the fact that one way or another people may get harmed during their lifetime. In the long run regulations just guarantee that, should the wrong people take power, the regulations and authority that originally allowed regulations will be abused.
I'm actually surprised I haven't seen more push back on government authority given everything Trump is either doing or claiming he will do. The president should be largely an anemic office acting more as a figurehead than anything else. We've given them the power to effectively legislate with no oversight, that why he may be able to do so much harm.
Can I use an Android phone without using Google? Yes, of course you can. There are plenty of secure OS's like Graphen, Lineage, Calyx and many others. Do people really care enough to use them? Hardly any, which proves my point.
Same thing here. Most people will just pay the fee to get the seats. Some might just opt out and not get them. Others will shop around and find some legacy cars that are older that have them but don't require a subscription.
At the end of the day? There's ALWAYS a choice. How hard do you want to look to avoid the subscription? Is it really worth your time and effort? Some would say yes, the vast majority really DGAF. People have been lulled into not caring about stuff like personal privacy and having a say in what's being peddled to you.
The seat heating was apparently shortening the life of the leather seats. Its cheaper to include heated seats in all cars, than it is to maintain 2 different sets of production. The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled.
Likewise, if you manually enabled the seat heaters, then complained that the seats were falling apart quickly, having given you a legal out to get that feature enabled in warranty, would not have to replace your seats for free.
Not to mention, they apparently already ditched the subscription over backlash.
I never heard of car-manufacturers periodically replacing seats within warranty because of the wear of the material, regardless of being "more frequently" or not. This sounds like a massive oversight in product-design.
Of all the cases I know, the customer had to bear the cost of such "wear and tear" cases.
If you agree that above are edge cases too, I have a Volkswagen to sell you [0].
I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car.
>enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default?
Big topic for me. My car has a DPF, and appears to have been geared such that despite containing an automatic DPF burn process, the engine never quite reaches the required temperature, so I need to perform manual burns.
I have straight up asked the dealer for a method to enable the auto burn process, manually. And have asked if theres a retune available, to make the gearing just a little bit less efficient, giving me more power and more engine heat.
The issue, pretty much verbatim from their head regional diesel mechanic is that any modifications of that nature would fuck the emissions standards they had to limbo under. So its categorically denied. They also issued me with stern official warnings that anything I do to make the car more reliable may also void my warranty. And the unofficial advice I have received is that the DPF is "f*cked mate" and to "get the petrol hybrid before the government forces it to wear a similar PPF"
The car also very suspiciously moderates the engine output unrelated to gearing/tune. Just sometimes underperforms at random. I believe its computational again, like you say, handicapping it for emissions reasons.
These things are largely optional for me, but I wont mess with them too much until I am out of warranty.