So plan ahead. For the 2024 model of each iPhone, get all the permissions to release all of the firmware in year 2032.

It’s the smaller products and businesses that cease to exist because it’s too expensive to meet regulations. Bad regulation raises the cost of entry into the market and strengthens the big players like Apple.

And that's one that got big enough to remember them. Wikipedia lists 188 mobile phone manufacturers [1]. A lot of them very local (e.g. EvertekTunisie making phones for Tunisia and Morocco) or defunct; But even my local (German) retailer offers 35 brands. Big ones like Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi, budget brands like Oppo or ZTE, niche brands like CAT or Beafon. It's a crowded market that doesn't seem particularly hard to enter.

And judging by the spotty compatibility of LineageOS they don't all use the same hardware either.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_manufact...

Europe has an unhealthy culture of naturalistic hippiedom, so this is just the same thing that causes Germany to shut down nuclear power.

(If you think this one's good, try combining it with their six other giant laws you haven't heard of some of which conflict with this.)

And every country regulates cell phones in particular, since they use shared airwaves, have rare earth metals in them, sometimes have exploding batteries etc.

Really? Are you claiming that capitalists are so much of a fool that instead of making, say, half the profit they were making before in an unregulated market, they would readily prefer to make 0 profits? The reality is that if American BigTech exit the EU market, then some local or non-American competitor will step in to fill the vacuum. Or have you already forgotten that the European Nokia once dominated the mobile phone industry?

As a legislative body it certainly isn't perfect but you are ascribing motivations and making statements about it that have zero connection with reality.

Please do link the other "six giant laws that conflict".

The people on here saying phone OSes should be open source and unlocked to make them last longer will find the ecodesign and security regulations actually encourage locking them down so you can't break them.

could you specify the actual GDPR regulations in question which clearly conflict with these battery regulations (without any creative contrivance required on our part)?

or are you saying there isn't a conflict in that case (in which case, which ones do?) that part wasn't clear

it seems like a creative but unlikely contrivance that there is an actual legal conflict there as you describe

you quoting yourself when it doesn't answer the question, without adding more context, leads me to believe that you don't think there is any actual legal conflict there, either

Yes, I firmly believe every every manufacturer would ignore an economic block full of developed countries and 450M people.

This is the sort of bad take that keeps me returning to HN. Some people here are incredibly dense.

On a side note, I wouldn't mind if Apple decided to not sell their toys around here anymore.

Regulations can be adapted to affect only the companies that reach X percentage in sales or in market share. The EU's Digital Markets Act does precisely this, for instance.

The regulators can let smaller players grow and thrive, and regulate them once they've exceeded a certain threshold.

Look at that GDPR popup. I and everyone I know just clicks “Accept All Cookies” now.

Sometimes regulators make something amazing, but sometimes it’s a load of turd. It’s hard to tell what’s going to turn out sometimes.

No one is building a product from complete scratch.

One could also imagine radically different IP laws concerning firmware or even software.

Moreover, there exist devices with fully open source firmware, so if anybody wanted one to copy, they don't need yours. They only need yours to use it with your hardware.

These devices have a chip in them that needs drivers and firmware. That's software. In particular it's the software that interfaces with the operating system. But the software is specific to a given version of the Linux kernel. When a new kernel comes out, you often have to update the software, for which you need the source code. So when the vendor stops doing this without publishing the code, nobody else can cost effectively do it either, and you can no longer use the hardware with recent versions of the kernel. But older kernel versions have known security vulnerabilities in them, so you can't use those either.

The ask is not that they provide free factories for everyone to make their own hardware, it's that they release the source code for this software in particular. Anybody could then copy the software, but it's only useful in combination with their hardware. A competitor in China can't use the same drivers with some other chip, that chip would need different drivers. That's what drivers are. So the only people who want this code are the people who paid the hardware vendor for their product and want to continue using it.

The hardware vendor, by contrast, doesn't want to give it to them, not because they fear some competitor using it but because then the customer would be able to keep using the hardware they paid for instead of having to buy a new one. Which is unreasonable enough to prohibit.

Well, it would also allow compatible hardware to be manufactured. E.g. "IBM compatible".

And it also has no meaning in this context. What is "compatible" with a WiFi chip or a storage controller? They're all already compatible with each other. The driver is the thing that converts from the device-specific operations to the APIs provided by the kernel. The kernel APIs are already public and anyone can implement them for their own hardware.

Do you want to sell your devices in this large, debeloped, profitable market? The you have to comply.

Manufacturing supply chains are already awfully complicated beast. Complying with reflgulaion of providing firmware for your hardware should hardly be a huge problem.

In 2011 you obtain a patent wholly owned by the company.

In 2012 you fail to pay the franchise tax and filing paperwork for your company so the state dissolves it. You don't care because you aren't making money.

In 2013 another company starts making a product that infringes on your patent.

You are the defacto owner of the patent. This is because you were the owner of the company when it was terminated. All of its assets and liabilities devolved to you. No action was required of you for this to happen, it just happens.

Now imagine this business was actually a joint venture between two wholly owned subsidiaries of two different holding companies, one of which was public but has gone bankrupt and the other was private but subsequently merged with a public conglomerate that spun off a child company, keeping only 40% of its stock after IPO.

The patent is still owned by people, but good luck finding them all.

The invention as disclosed and documented in the patent is free to the world.

This is reversing the natural order of things. That bureaucrat isn't nullifying fucking ANYTHING. That bureaucrat is artificially limiting who is allowed to create/use a thing.

The natural state of the information is: "Use this - it's free". The whole of humanity might exist because mirror neurons literally go: "Hey - I can do that too!".

It's only when you add a monstrously complex and entirely artificial patent system on top of things that it gets complex.

So we're ALREADY deciding who is allowed to use things, and it's already artificial and bureaucratic.

All this does is fucking stop making it worse. And patent/copywrite is already so god damn egregious as a system. I'm firmly in the camp of "nuke it from orbit". It's time to try something other than this hideous abusive system.

I agree that patents are odd here, but the solution isn't to patch in more power to bureaucrats over the top of the other power. You seem to be saying this at the end as well, so, as I say, I'm not sure what point you're making. But your excitement on this topic is appreciated.

What is confusing here? The entire structure is already a perversion of the natural world.

If we did not have our government, and the rules that it enforces (those "bureaucrats" you don't seem to like), then there is no "invention" to be nullified.

They already have this power. They enforce it through violence and imprisonment (tools reserved officially to the government). If the bureaucrats want your idea - they will take it, because they are the only thing stopping them from doing so.

The question is not: "Will the government nullify my invention?!?!?". It's - "What might my life have been like if the government did not restrict SO many people from competing at all - by artificially stopping them from using the tools and ideas they see around them? (for fairly ridiculous time periods)"

This is possible, but the power to enforce patents is in the courts, and not in the patent bureaucracy. Having a single group that can invalidate parents on a whim is different to that.

And patents can be useful, although I don't have many examples. SawStop is one, though, where even a 20 year patent doesn't seem to have been long enough to establish a successful business before incumbents swoop in. Patents like that are pro-competition in that scenario. Otherwise why bother starting a new business when your R&D effort can just be taken advantage of by someone else as soon as you hit on the answer?

In reality, it's a bunch of work which costs money, and if you don't have to spend that money, why would you?

There's an entire government department dedicated to selling this property.

Arguably the American model of abandonment is better because abandoned IP doesn't actually result in any lawsuits, while that UK model is built to effectively encourage them.

I think I have even more elegant solution. All IP should be subject to a tax (or maintenance fee or whatever you want to call it). As soon as the IP owner fails to pay the tax, IP falls to public domain irrevocably. The actual structure of the tax can be subject to debate. I would propose a highly progressive tax over time, for example for patents something like $100 for the first year, then doubling every year.

Seriously, why should IP not be taxed? We tax almost everything else that is possible to tax. Especially given it is far from certain that IP is net benefit for society. (I'm willing to give the benefit of doubt though, that's why I am not proposing to abolish IP completely)

I can support your proposal only if the IP taxes are deductible from incoming tax.

If you can't see the glaring problems there then there's no hope for you....

But hopefully you immediately recognize that it hurts the least advantaged the greatest while also providing a mechanism for anticompetitive behavior under the guise of following your precept (make the fee high enough and only established authors/publishers can hold any copyright).

I really get the feeling you didn't think it through at all....

Correct, but easily solved if the tax were to be based on license sales numbers and income. Small/poor license owners would pay almost nothing whereas the big players would pay plenty.

If there's no income the fee is negligible, permitting the rights holder to squat on them for next to nothing and prevent the use of the otherwise abandoned IP by the public....

For instance, an art gallery takes a photo of an artwork that's out of copyright for reference/insurance and (a) doesn't allow photos in the gallery and (b) the photo which is copyright isn't on sale (as it wasn't intended for that purpose). So the out of copyright artwork is locked up from reproduction.

Variations on this theme are a problem with galleries and museums worldwide.

If it wasn't viable then it would either never be created or would automatically enter the public domain.

Currently, if IP is not commercially viable then the author has the choice of not creating it, or creating it and releasing it under CC or just public domain. So essentially the same.

To assert the model isn't blatantly flawed is absurd

I said the structure can be discussed. There is no problem giving first number of years free to see if the IP is commercially viable. The aggressive progression (doubling every year) means that literally all IP is in public domain after a couple of decades.

A simpler solution is to start with a return to something resembling the original IP laws where one lost their rights within their own lifetime.... Theres a reason that was originally proposed, rather than lifetime protections, and why creators originally accepted it with glee... All parties need to remember those reasons, whether rights holder, state or consumer.

Just stop fighting for a broken concept and come up with something better.

It's hard to see in the status quo, but it doesn't mean it can't be changed. Whatever system exists today works the way it does because laws defined (or didn't) how they operate. If we change those, the system has to change with it.

So no "permission" to release would be necessary if government's modified ther copyright laws to withdraw their granted protections after some "event" occurred.

The bigger problem is not the permission, it is actually finding the code so it could be 'released' once the event triggered. To make this work would require some form of required escrow in order to gain copyright protection in the first place where the code would be held until such time as the removal of copyright protection from it triggered, and then it could be released.

Trying to mandate that for all software might be too ambitious to politically succeed in practice - but mandating source code escrow for software used in certain regulated devices - smartphones, cars, planes, medical devices, etc - might be more achievable. You wouldn’t even need to touch copyright law, it would just need to be a product regulation. Of course, copyright law would have to be touched for a compulsory license, but consider that phase 2 and source code escrow as phase 1 - phase 1 could be enacted now, phase 2 saved for later

There's no such thing as a natural right, period. They're all imaginary creations of humans.

There is a recent movement trying to redefine them as such, led by moneyed interests that would obviously stand to profit from such arguments; but legal history is very clear: IP was never conceived on the grounds of being "natural" or "innate" in any way, but as a device to sustain certain economic sectors. IP is no more natural than subsidies for carmakers are natural.

Copyright and patent are not among those. The Constitution provides that congress can grant "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

"Limited times" could be defined by congress to "expire" under whatever circumstances they choose.

Realistically, I'm sure there's a loophole they can leverage to achieve these. The EU is a major party to the WIPO and other members will likely be open to "renegotiating" if the alternative is the EU leaving completely rendering the WIPO pointless. The US pulled this stunt many times with other international orgs and treaties.

"We would never think about taking your IP but if you want to do business in this region, you must agree to voluntarily open-source all drivers after the product is no longer maintained."

Or:

"Of course you don't have to agree to anything but if you stop supporting the product and don't open source the drivers, consumers can obtain money damages for their devices becoming inoperable. "

Then it would be understood and agreed that anyone making software they have to release as open source what was closed source 5 years back. This way I would say that you can't bring the "but the competitors will use this to steal my business" argument.

What you would get in essence is a snapshot of what technology looked like 5 years ago (or a decent number of years people can agree on) and you can fork from there if there's a will to give a second life to various devices.

But really, I don't want an ugly phone because someone decided batteries should be user replaceable like in the old days. And yes, I like my iPhone to be sleek.

I don't know about ugly, but my galaxy s5 with a replaceable battery was barely thicker than an iphone 14 without one: 8.1 mm vs 7.8 mm, according to wikipedia. The difference is actually bigger between the 14 and the 7, so even without removable batteries, iphones are getting thicker.

The GS5 was also IP67 certified, and, indeed, it had no issues under heavy rain attached to my motorcycle handlebars, during multiple long trips.

I strongly doubt that having a removable cover would noticeably alter the phone's looks or thickness.

Secondly, you put prioritise on asthetics over what's good for the planet?

It’s a typical facade argument you might hear from politicians when they parrot lobbiysts.

Exactly the reason to force manufacturers to change their supply chains.