Software is rarely sold (outside of bespoke development). All the off the shelf software is essentially rented.
Software itself has no legal value - the copyright is what is considered to be property. That property can be leased or sold. This is why copyright infringement is called infringement and not theft.
When you “buy” software, you are actually entering into a lease contract to use the software (sometimes perpetual, but increasingly only temporary) which can have various terms and conditions (that you really should read, but never do). But that lease doesn’t grant you the copyright.
I don't think this way of selling (or as you say renting) stuff should be considered legal.
And then it get even more complex when you get in to online services. Game consoles are going online only next gen. If you buy the ps5 digital edition and you mod your OS and sony bans you from their servers, your console is now a brick. But in many cases its fair to be banned such as banning cheaters.
(I avoid nvidia whenever possible)
This means I'm not buying but renting, which is not how it is advertised.
If you buy a GPU you own it and the copy of the software it came with. You are free to use that combination as you choose, forever.
It’s not renting because you don’t have to pay rent to continue to use it. There may be software license restrictions, typically against modifying or reverse-engineering the software, However, it is an error to say that those license restrictions convert your ownership into anything like a rental agreement.
Some digital activists say that we don’t really own the devices that we buy because of license restrictions or restricted device firmware. It’s hyperbole. We do own our devices and the copies of the software they came with, even if they came with artificial limitations.
Does that sound like ownership? Can BMW employee pop over to your garage one day remove some bits of the car he thinks you shouldn't have any more?
That does not sound like ownership to me - again, think back to car ownership. Firstly tampering with your car would have been criminal damage.
Secondly, BMW does not get a say in how you use your car. They can't stop you going over the speed limit. You could get your car fixed without having to involve BMW or going to court to force their hand.
In my view this Sony case looks like compensation for breach of a lease-like contract.
Members of the class could opt out of the settlement and sue Sony individually. A court could theoretically enjoin Sony to restore the feature for those individual plaintiffs, but the plaintiffs would have to show that monetary damages would be insufficient. Generally courts don’t like to force defendants to do things when paying money would be an acceptable outcome.
> In my view this Sony case looks like compensation for breach of a lease-like contract.
I haven’t read the complaint in that case but the plaintiffs probably alleged a breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. So, yes, possibly a breach of contract claim but not a lease. (Note: A lease is a specific form of contract in which a lessor transfers possession of property to a lessee, but retains a future interest in the property after the contract term ends.)
You do NOT own the software that comes with your GPU!
Ownership implies the ability to transfer, modify, and resell, none of which are within the rights granted by the license of said software.
It's not "rental" either - it's licensing. You don't have to become a lawyer, but knowing and understanding the difference between proprietorship (ownership) and possession is a good start. Same goes for renting vs. licensing vs. ownership.
TL;DR you do not have ownership of any software that came with any device you bought and it's not hyperbole at all.
When you purchase a consumer GPU that comes with software, you acquire the GPU, the copy of the software it came with, and a license to use the software subject to particular terms and conditions. That is what you own, no more, no less.
This is inaccurate, at least as to purchases software. A license is not a contract because the licensee is not required to do anything. A license can have conditions (restriction), but not covenants (promises to do something). A license basically functions as a defense against a claim of infringement.
Note: For purchased software there is a contract for the sale of the software subject to the license, but that shouldn’t be confused with the license itself.
That's simply not true. You are indeed making a contract for the sale of the license itself. Otherwise subscription models wouldn't work and would even be legally allowed to share and resell the software, which you aren't (i.e. just because it's possible to resell an acquired license while keeping a working copy, doesn't make it legal to do so).
As you correctly point out, one who sells his only license to a piece of software no longer has a license. If he kept a copy of the software and continues to use it, he is committing an act of infringement. That is the same whether the license is for a term (subscription) or perpetual.
The datacenter-versus-personal conditions of NVidia drivers attach instead to the use of the copyrighted work. These restrictions are based on the idea of an end user license agreement as an enforceable contract, either agreed-upon when the driver is downloaded or through a theory that copyright attaches to the temporary (in-memory) copy of the driver necessary to run it.
See if you can convince them to "let you" publish a benchmark of their database management system.
Start there.
that the data set is large enough that cannot fit in memory
that storage is orders of magnitude slower than memory and memory is orders of magnitude slower than processor cache
Oracle has the “best implementation” given these constraints.
Is that not the case?
First, while storage used to be orders of magnitude slower than memory, not SSD storage is just a single order of magnitude slower;
Second, in many domains now it's often practical to ensure that your data set can fit in memory. For example, if your system is for storing financial transactions (which is a prime market for Oracle), then your enterprise has to be quite large to get a terabyte of transactions and you can put a terabyte (or much more) of RAM in a database system if you choose to.
So how would anyone (legally) know?
As for software, well, EA has the right to ban me from their servers if I hack their games, even if I did pay for the product, and this makes sense because it ruins everyone else's experience. I don't pay for HN but if I did they still would have a right to ban my account if I start posting slurs or other abusive content.
Is it desirable? Of course it's desirable; imagine having no control over your own creations and having to deal with the consequences of other people abusing it.
EA famously uses online-only DRM in many of their modern titles; if you get banned from, say, SimCity, you can't run the game at all. There is no "offline mode".
Also, SimCity eventually got an offline mode.
For the record I am against always on DRM so I did not buy this game nor any other game that uses it. I don't believe we need to codify laws banning the practice or any such thing that requires software developers to build things they don't want to build (with the exception of critical fields such as healthcare and aviation).
It's desirable in that a one time purchase does not entitle a customer to a lifetime of server resources; they paid for the game and they can certainly keep the game, but they don't have a right to the services required by the game (those are recurring costs). This makes sense since the alternative is forcing EA to pay to host servers for people that violated their terms of service.
You are correct that it got an offline mode eventually, I overlooked this. But this demonstrates that the market corrected this problem: Enough consumers complained to force a change. Therefore, is there need for external intervention? The simple solution to always-on DRM seems to be to just avoid buying any products that use it.
Only in a limited form e.g. exhaustion doctrine prevents you from restricting resale. If someone wants to resell their exclusive Ferrari, there's nothing Ferrari can legally do (though this'll probably get you blacklisted from ever receiving an exclusive vehicle).
In general, terms can't go against existing laws and have to be 'conscionable' to be enforceable (i.e. they can't be obviously 'unfair').
Sounds like discrimination to me, and not desirable.
But I'm arguing that when you hear "X is discrimination" then it's wrong to automatically imply that X is bad or X should be changed - there's just a narrow subset of discrimination that's immoral and should be avoided; and there's a narrow subset of discrimination that's illegal discrimination (there's some overlap between these two subsets but they are not exactly the same of course), but most discrimination - and certainly the default situation - is just reasonable human activity of us applying common sense and acting according to the specific situation instead of blindly acting the same no matter what like robots would, it's completely normal to adapt to the specific person and act differently to be most suitable with them, make adjustments and custom approaches for different individuals which definitely is discrimination but there's nothing a priori wrong with that. For example, custom pricing is one form of discrimination - offering a discount for students or senior peole is certainly discrimination, but we generally consider that it's entirely appropriate.
And in certain cases a lack of discrimination would be completely immoral - for example, the concept of "reasonable accomodations" is a requirement for discrimination; for example, a policy that forbids electronic devices in an exam does not discriminate in any way and applies equally to anyone (in colloquial language one might call it a "discriminatory policy" but that's wrong; perhaps I'm nitpicking on that but it a misuse of words to mean their exact opposite), but as it forbids hearing aids for people who need them, then that non-discrimination is bad; and also simply equally allowing all devices would be bad for other reasons, so ADA and equivalent laws require to discriminate and apply different rules to people with different abilities.
So if you see a practice that seems definitely bad and harmful, then "is it discrimination?" is the wrong question to ask, since it's very likely that it may be harmful but not discrimination, or it may be discrimination but nothing wrong with it; these aren't edge cases, the overlap is just partial. The proper question to ask is whether the criteria of the discrimination is fair (the up-thread issue of discriminating upon wealth certainly is debatable whether that should or should not be acceptable) and whether the results of that discrimination are appropriate.
The example on ability to repay is closely related to discrimination by pure wealth, but there are businesses with even more straightforward criteria, e.g. financial services that are offered only to individuals with net worth above a certain (quite large) amount, and having less money than that automatically disqualifies you from that service even if you were able and willing to pay the involved fees.
That was not the issue. The question was whether it is desirable.
Personally it leaves a bad taste. It reminds me of a fashion brand that doesn't sell to obese people (can't remember the name but it was in a documentary).
Are you allowing everybody who want to have sex with you to have sex with you or are you discriminating to a select few / unique person ?
Discriminations is part of human nature.
Glad to see someone also came to this conclusion!
Some american politician extended copyright protection towards software. The rest of the world eventually did the same.
> Is this desirable?
No.
> Can we reverse it?
Sure. We just need to have billions of dollars just like the copyright industry. That money can buy a lot of influence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Fran....
>> Is this desirable?
> No.
So I'm sure you'd be happy if I just took the software for whatever great startup idea you'd been slaving away on for the last two years, slapped better marketing on it, and undercut you by 50% since I didn't have to employ all those pesky overpaid engineers.
It is their product at that point, because they purchased it.
You should not have the rights to control someone else's product, such a a graphics card, or whatever, after they have purchased it. It's theirs now.
However, if nvidia has sold me a functional graphics card including the driver as an unalienable part of the package that I purchased (since the driver being functional is part of the card being 'fit for purpose' of the sale), I should be free to use the driver without any unreasonable restrictions. I have legally bought [a copy] of it, it's not copyright infringement for me to run it on a computer - even if it resides in a datacenter.
My whole point is that there needs to be more efforts to hack and modify these things, and that this would be "more desireable".
And that orgs should be using their power to cause this to happen more. For example, if open source orgs can weaponize licensing agreements against nvidia, in order to force them to do this, then they should and this would be desireable.
Laptops are generally an all or nothing proposition. I wanted a laptop with a high performance CPU and the nvidia GPU just came along with it. Couldn't even disable the thing in firmware since hardware video decoding with the Intel GPU caused kernel panics.
Like you showed your disapproval of Nvidia by giving them your money anyway. So... They're right - people care enough to complain, but not buy something else, so it doesn't really matter.
Are you aware of the concept of market power, switching costs, barriers to entry, and market lock in?
If so, then that should enlighten you as to the explanation for this.
> did it actually matter?
Yes. It matters, yet still did not change consumer behavior, due to the concept of market power.
Sure in theory you could run an open source driver, and in practice sometimes the river won't crash, but there's no point because you could get an equally good open source driver video card for the same price, since you can't get the fancy card's peak performance from the open source driver
Ok, so who gave software a special status over hardware? Is this desirable? Can we reverse it?