3 ms·

I agree, but How do we handle software ownership? If I sell you a piece of software that you now own, you can go and resell copies of that software to whoever

I agree, but How do we handle software ownership? If I sell you a piece of software that you now own, you can go and resell copies of that software to whoever you want. What is the best way to handle that?

tremon 10y ago
That is already solved, and it's called copyright: if you're not the copyright holder, you are not allowed to sell/rent other copies of the software. What you do with the copy you originally obtained, is (should be) covered by the first sale doctrine.
- irq-1 10y ago
  What about updates? Are manufactures obligated to provide: security patches? mainline updates? feature additions? source and build ability for self/after-market changes? Warranties on physical goods have a long history (in the US) of being void if the owner makes certain changes. Should that apply to software? (great comment btw)
  - tremon 10y ago
    Normal updates (e.g. timezone rule changes, updated maps, security fixes) should be covered under warranty service, and should (imnsho) always be at the owner's discretion (even if it's a simple checkbox "yes, install updates without asking"). Additional features could be treated as an up-selling opportunity for existing customers, or could be provided for free to create brand loyalty. A critical bugfix should be treated as a product recall/replacement and communicated as such, not pushed silently: I really do not want the software attitude of "let's ship it broken, we can always patch it later if customers complain" to trickle over into other product areas. (Yes, I'm aware that part of the above means that software engineering needs to grow up and become a real engineering discipline. I'm OK with that, in fact I think it's overdue.) Warranties on physical goods have a long history (in the US) of being void if the owner makes certain changes. Should that apply to software? I'm struggling to think of an example where this doesn't apply already. Can you give an example where a software company has honoured a warranty request even with custom modification? Or even where a warranty request for a pure software product was honoured? Even Firefox, a good example of a software product that thrives on third-party modifications, requests that you try to reproduce bugs in safe mode, with all add-ons disabled, and they give no guarantees about following up on your report. The only example I can think of right now is Microsoft's support strategy: they will bill you for the support request unless you can successfully convince them that it's a genuine bug in their software. But I don't think MS support tickets are an example of product warranty, since it's provided as an additional service anyway.
Silhouette 10y ago
We could start by just going back to the original spirit of copyright: it's there to prevent multiplication, not to be invoked as a legal technicality to restrict how someone can use and enjoy a creative work once they already acquired a legitimate copy. The idea that copyright law should prevent things like format shifting or making personal back-up copies of a song or movie someone already paid for is absurd to me. It's just the legal version of scope creep. The idea that copyright law should allow people who sell software to impose arbitrary restrictions on how it may be used or whether that copy can subsequently be passed on to someone else or any other unrelated conditions for that matter, all because of technicalities about making transient copies when software is installed on a device or executed from RAM, is just the worst kind of legal sophistry. I think there are reasonable arguments about alternative business models, particularly permanent sales vs. some sort of temporary rental arrangement. There's a danger here that for pure knowledge works we may shift towards a system where everyone has to rent everything, but I think it's too early to say that the market can't sort this one out on its own and the success of services like Netflix and Spotify suggests that other models can be useful as well. In a some very limited cases, I think there are also valid reasons to restrict what the general public are allowed to do with software, but these are mostly regulatory issues where we already have similar concerns with physical devices, such as preventing someone who doesn't know what they're doing from bringing down a communications network by transmitting noise and effectively DoS attacking everyone else. But IMHO these cases should invariably be addressed with their own suitable laws or regulations, issued by the relevant government authorities for the common good, not by the original developers subverting the principle of copyright for their own purposes. Otherwise, for a physical product that only includes software incidentally anyway, I just don't see any ethical basis for restricting what the customer can do with it just because of the software element, and abusing copyright law for that purpose just shows how broken copyright law has become.

tremon 10y ago

That is already solved, and it's called copyright: if you're not the copyright holder, you are not allowed to sell/rent other copies of the software. What you do with the copy you originally obtained, is (should be) covered by the first sale doctrine.

irq-1 10y ago
What about updates? Are manufactures obligated to provide: security patches? mainline updates? feature additions? source and build ability for self/after-market changes? Warranties on physical goods have a long history (in the US) of being void if the owner makes certain changes. Should that apply to software? (great comment btw)
- tremon 10y ago
  Normal updates (e.g. timezone rule changes, updated maps, security fixes) should be covered under warranty service, and should (imnsho) always be at the owner's discretion (even if it's a simple checkbox "yes, install updates without asking"). Additional features could be treated as an up-selling opportunity for existing customers, or could be provided for free to create brand loyalty. A critical bugfix should be treated as a product recall/replacement and communicated as such, not pushed silently: I really do not want the software attitude of "let's ship it broken, we can always patch it later if customers complain" to trickle over into other product areas. (Yes, I'm aware that part of the above means that software engineering needs to grow up and become a real engineering discipline. I'm OK with that, in fact I think it's overdue.) Warranties on physical goods have a long history (in the US) of being void if the owner makes certain changes. Should that apply to software? I'm struggling to think of an example where this doesn't apply already. Can you give an example where a software company has honoured a warranty request even with custom modification? Or even where a warranty request for a pure software product was honoured? Even Firefox, a good example of a software product that thrives on third-party modifications, requests that you try to reproduce bugs in safe mode, with all add-ons disabled, and they give no guarantees about following up on your report. The only example I can think of right now is Microsoft's support strategy: they will bill you for the support request unless you can successfully convince them that it's a genuine bug in their software. But I don't think MS support tickets are an example of product warranty, since it's provided as an additional service anyway.

Silhouette 10y ago

We could start by just going back to the original spirit of copyright: it's there to prevent multiplication, not to be invoked as a legal technicality to restrict how someone can use and enjoy a creative work once they already acquired a legitimate copy. The idea that copyright law should prevent things like format shifting or making personal back-up copies of a song or movie someone already paid for is absurd to me. It's just the legal version of scope creep. The idea that copyright law should allow people who sell software to impose arbitrary restrictions on how it may be used or whether that copy can subsequently be passed on to someone else or any other unrelated conditions for that matter, all because of technicalities about making transient copies when software is installed on a device or executed from RAM, is just the worst kind of legal sophistry. I think there are reasonable arguments about alternative business models, particularly permanent sales vs. some sort of temporary rental arrangement. There's a danger here that for pure knowledge works we may shift towards a system where everyone has to rent everything, but I think it's too early to say that the market can't sort this one out on its own and the success of services like Netflix and Spotify suggests that other models can be useful as well. In a some very limited cases, I think there are also valid reasons to restrict what the general public are allowed to do with software, but these are mostly regulatory issues where we already have similar concerns with physical devices, such as preventing someone who doesn't know what they're doing from bringing down a communications network by transmitting noise and effectively DoS attacking everyone else. But IMHO these cases should invariably be addressed with their own suitable laws or regulations, issued by the relevant government authorities for the common good, not by the original developers subverting the principle of copyright for their own purposes. Otherwise, for a physical product that only includes software incidentally anyway, I just don't see any ethical basis for restricting what the customer can do with it just because of the software element, and abusing copyright law for that purpose just shows how broken copyright law has become.