If I buy a car, I should be able to decide what I want to do with it. Where I want to drive. Who I allow in it. Where I want to buy gas. Where I want to repair it. Where I want to buy parts. If I want to sell it. and so on and so on.
Once sold, the new owner should have complete control, and all rights should belong to him. If an actor (in this case, the manufacture) can exercise control over the product after its been sold, then the manufacture has illegally taken possession of the product.
In this view, disabling "other os" in playstation was an act of sabotage. Deleting books from the kindle was stealing. It really become simple if one would just accept that the owner is the one that should be in full control of his own property.
The whole PS3 removal of otherOS is a plain "computer crimes" law. Charge Sony with 1 count per device. Nice criminal case there.
Next we have Monsanto, who runs around finding seeds contaminated with roundup resistance. If you, a farmer, try to save seed, you will get bit by this. Since Monsanto argues it's their patent and their seed, I say we agree with them. And when their property is elsewhere, that sounds like trespassing...for.every.seed.
Trespassing in Indiana can be fined up to $1000 and 6 month jail sentence. Each of these seeds are "their" property. Lets say that a contaminated field is 500,000 seeds. $1000 per seed is $500 Million.
Of course, if Monsanto abandons their "property", or lays no claim to it, there wouldn't be a judgement on trespassing.
1. Remove the barriers. Drop import and export restrictions, drop punitive tariffs, reduce taxes; at the same time, make restrictive DRM and equivalents (copyright controlling imports, in the instant case) illegal. This will reduce production costs and reduce selling prices. Overall, standard of living will rise slightly where production costs are low and sink more dramatically where production was formerly located. Eventually, the markets should reallocate themselves efficiently, but it can be a long and painful process and lots of people will get hurt.
2. Enforce all the barriers more rigorously. Apply import tariffs on everything, support local producers by mandating price floors, don't allow reimportation at all. Smuggling becomes much more lucrative, as does the black market. Advances in miniaturization mean that we can track fractional ownership of everything; instead of buying a coffee machine, you rent one, along with the mugs and spoons. (Clearly we need to reduce frictional costs immensely, or else the inertia drags us to a halt.)
3. We continue to muddle through, with incremental improvements when we (as a society, not we as hackers) recognize the need. Markets get regulated, but not very well or efficiently. Perhaps biases toward the established parties are corrected, perhaps not. If a sufficiently large proportion of the population is enraged, revolution ensues and all bets are off. Otherwise, business as usual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_...
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap6.html
Then go about repealing other laws that allow companies to slice and dice their markets in this way at the expense of their customers.
I don't know, it's a hugely complex area. All I can say is it sticks in my craw when things like the Lik-Sang debacle happen in Europe, but at the same time we see industry disappearing abroad. At the moment the big interests seem to be having their cake and eating it too.
If there are laws about working conditions for (say) electronics assembly plant workers in the UK, then the UK could insist that any imported electronics are made under similarly compliant conditions abroad - i.e. if you want to access out market you play by our rules. This could cover minimum wages also.
Under those circumstances I would be more happy with grey imports being disallowed, and I would be interested to see the economic outcome.
Globalisation has meant that some companies can shop around the entire globe for raw materials and manpower, looking for the best price for both. They then throw up every barrier they can to stop individuals doing the same, region locking and other DRM, bought laws to prevent workarounds etc.
They also try to prevent other businesses taking advantage of market disparities to undercut 'official' prices. The same market disparities that allow them to get their labour and materials for next to nothing. The whole thing stinks.