Well, the law can stop you from repairing your own John Deere tractor.
https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/farmers-cant-leg...
I'm not saying I agree with John Deere's attempt to prevent people from playing around with its tractor software, but I am saying that you're exaggerating here.
I don't disagree that my link may not be the best story to illustrate the point.
Having said that, here's some additional context to the same story:
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
>> a neighbor, Kerry Adams, hasn’t been able to fix an expensive transplanter because he doesn’t have access to the diagnostic software he needs. He’s not alone: many farmers are opting for older, computer-free equipment.
http://boingboing.net/2015/05/13/john-deere-of-course-you-ow...
Has a scan of John Deere's response to the Wired story above.
Paraphrase: John Deere is opposed to a revision to the DRM law that "would allow owners of equipment, including Deere competitors or software developers, to access or hack Deere's protected software to repair, diagnose or modify vehicle software".
I get that most simple repairs to tractors might be just mechanical parts, but when you're dealing with add-ons (transplanters?) or fine tuning issues like emissions systems (ahem, Volkswagen), I am guessing you usually need access to the diagnostics systems or computer to see and/or understand what's going on before being able to fix it.
I also wouldn't be surprised if (much like cars), tractors generally only need mechanical repairs over the duration of their lifespans.
No, they said "...the law can stop you from repairing...", which is true.
"I also wouldn't be surprised if (much like cars), tractors generally only need mechanical repairs over the duration of their lifespans."
I know little about tractors, but your statement is not true for modern cars. Often repairs cannot be completed by mechanical means alone, and require interfacing with or modifying the software in the car. Even if you replace a broken airbag, the light will stay on until you take the car to the dealer to have it reset.
Even if your statement were true, who gets to decide what repairs are required over the life of the car/tractor? If not the owner, then why not?
But you'd be wrong. Take a look at the top comment here[1]:
A recent BMW, in which all I did was replace a dead battery, required a trip to the dealer to "accept" this new battery.
So yes, the ECU software can really do prevent you from repairing any mechanical part of the machine, as long as the ECU has a monitoring sensor for that part.
The thing that's different now is that in the old days, the days when it wasn't possible for devices to phone home, they operated independently and contained the functionality offered within themselves. There were no servers to worry about.
It didn't matter if the manufacturer closed a business unit, discontinued the product, or anything else; the functionality you paid for at the time of purchase was contained within the component itself. These days, the functionality is contained in code running on someone else's servers, which may be shut down, disabled, or non-functional at any time.
Potential solutions to this:
a) educate consumers so that it's obvious when they're buying a device whose primary functions are not self-contained, and so that they don't buy these.
b) make some legal requirement that the systems running the primary functionality are online and accessible for at least X time after the last unit is sold, or the code can be loaded onto and executed upon the device in a self-contained manner if the primary functional system goes offline, or similar.
c) allow people to reverse engineer the hardware, make alternate firmwares that perform the promised functions within the device itself, require the primary functional service code be stored in escrow in case of shutdown, and, if shut down, then the copyright is automatically invalidated and the code automatically released, so that it can be run and/or modified by any interested party. Legal structures would have to be installed to protect people who do this.
What do you mean ? If it's Free software, then you should have no issue setting up a server at home by yourself. Many folks run their own server-side clients for online games, this is far from being unheard of.
You may not like it, but sometimes, the market moves in ways you do not like. All you can do is adapt or put your own product out there instead.
In this case, the free market is doing stupid shit again.
Besides that, you're missing something important about the idea of a free market. Whenever a problem or an issue arises, eventually somebody somewhere will introduce a product or solution that addresses that problem. If the problem is seen as troubling for a significant number of people, enough people will buy that solution/product, which will incentivize more suppliers/producers provide even more of such solutions and products.
Basic economics. No need to write regulation to force companies to build functionality that people do not even want or care much about in the first place. If people are too stupid to look out for themselves, let them be punished for the consequences of their stupidity.
- Economies of scale. In areas where fixed costs of production are huge, a one-size-barely-fits-all beats specialized solutions. Consider the mobile market. After Blackberry lost in the smartphone wars, there is no phone available that would be a decent tool. All of them are made for the lowest common denominator, and are useful for anything other than consumption as little as it is possible to still get people looking for practical aspects to buy them. Smartphone manufacturing has huge fixed costs, so when anyone ever tries to service a niche market, those phones are terribly expensive.
- Related: customers don't demand new things, they chose from what is available. Most people do their tasks by choosing from what is available. Rarely one does dream up a new solution (those who do end up sometimes creating them). New solutions only appear when there's a market incentive to make them - when someone believes they can make money on it. Which is determined by what can be sold profitably, not by what people actually need.
Compare: the famous (and probably misattributed) Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Also compare: Tesla having to force the market to accept electric vehicles by pouring shit tons of money until they actually became profitable. Rarely one has both enough will to fix the world and enough money to force the market to follow.
- Related: market optimizes for profitability, not for value. "How much people are willing to pay for it" is only a proxy for "how this thing is useful". It's worth to look at the areas where this proxy fails.
- Pour enough money into sales & marketing, and you can sell anything regardless of whether it is actually useful or not. People can be manipulated into believing they need your product, or the need may be manufactured out of thin air - and nowadays it's usually cheaper than making something actually useful.
- Related: information asymmetry. The wonders of free market depend in a big part on perfect and instant information exchange. This is not the case in real world, and the companies have all the incentive to deceive and misinform customers about their products (and their competition).
So no, new solutions do not only appear when a market incentive is there. If anything, the market's role is better described as determining whether to drive the mass-production of these solutions.
On a tangential note, innovation and free markets may have little more than a relationship by happenstance now that I think about it.
And to your point regarding sales and marketing, this is exactly what I meant when I talk about not coddling stupid people. If stupid people are driven to buy a product because a particular celebrity endorses it, let them waste their money on that crap. Honestly, the government could only do so much to baby-proof the world for the stupid people. I am a big believer in the notion that government should only intervene against this idiocy when such behavior negatively impacts the rest of society (see chain smokers and the cost they incur on our health care system).
And nobody here is condoning this notion that companies be allowed to openly lie and deceive consumers. I'm not quite sure where this information asymmetry aspect you bring up is coming from. Free markets require an informed citizenry to perform efficiently.
I know this sounds crazy but maybe the owner of the device could host the server themselves on a Raspberry Pi.
By the way if everything was opensource then vendors would try to make their hubs compatible with as much devices of other vendors as possible. Now you don't have to replace everything in your home only the hub.
That's some glorious equivocation the EFF is pulling here.
You can still do this today. Nothing stops you from taking apart, repairing and tweaking devices you buy.
What you can't get today and that you could never, ever get before either, is the guarantee that the company you bought that device from will keep its servers alive for any given period of time.
Anyone who thinks that open source is the way out of this dilemma needs a reality check.
The fact that the source is open gives you exactly zero guarantees that a company will keep paying for servers that runs this code. Zero. If you're lucky, someone will pick that source up and deploy servers to run it, but again, no guarantees.
> Customers likely didn't expect that, 18 months after the last Revolv Hubs were sold, instead of getting more upgrades, the device would be intentionally, permanently, and completely disabled.
Then they were naïve customers. If the terms of service don't include such a guarantee, then you don't have it, period. It doesn't matter if the source is open or closed or if the company that provides the device is worth billions or just an angel funded startup.
> In an ideal world, Hub owners would be free to point their devices at a different central server, run by a third-party competitor or a trusted friend,
They can do this today, the world doesn't need to be "ideal", there just needs to be a financial incentive for a company to run such software. That's what happens in a free trade economy, supply and demand rule. This economy gives us a lot of benefits but you need to be ready to face the reality that sometimes, it won't give you what you want.
> But there's another way to push back against untrustworthy devices, and that's refusing to buy electronics and software that prioritize the manufacturer's wishes above your own.
What a great idea. Now, can you give a few examples of alternate devices that give us the kind of guarantee you are advocating?
I would certainly love to hear about them.
Sometimes, I wonder if the EFF lives on the same planet I live on.