5 ms·

Licensing is not the same as purchasing. I don’t think banning the concept of licensing would be helpful.

by jeremyjh 7y ago

imtringued 7y ago
I don't think banks would be happy if someone returned their "tuned" car after the lease ended.
- short_sells_poo 7y ago
  When you lease a car, you do not own it. The bank owns the car and depending on the country of residence, the dealership is possibly on the hook for a guaranteed buyout price. The lessee is certainly not allowed to "tune" the car without the consent of the bank/dealership. They are usually not even allowed to service it anywhere but at an authorized garage. This is different from outright purchase of the car, where you can literally drive it to the nearest scrap yard and have it crushed right after purchase :)
  - falcolas 7y ago
    > This is different from outright purchase of the car Even this right is being eroded - see Tesla. You can drive it to the scrap yard, but someone else can't always drive it back out.
    - ajayyy 7y ago
      That's Tesla, which is one of the targets of right to repair
emiliobumachar 7y ago
I think it would be very helpful to demand that all leases are labeled properly. Where we are it says "Buy" on the ad, "Buy" on the button, and "Lease" deep inside the 30-page Terms Of Service. It's very reasonable to say that the vendors created an expectation of ownership to push their sale. If you didn't notice that I called them "vendors" instead of "leasers", it adds to my point.
Silhouette 7y ago
I don’t think banning the concept of licensing would be helpful. Other things being equal, I would agree. However, if market forces push us into a choice between ordinary people being able to own things and use them freely against ordinary people being forced to pay rent on everything forever and use things only as some higher power dictates, it's not going to take long to make that choice. This is the choice that we are heading towards with the increasing use of software and, in particular, the repurposing of laws originally intended to prevent exploiting the work of others to create software so that they constrain the ordinary use of a product by the person who bought it.
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
Withing the next 10-15 years 95% of household appliances and furniture will have a chip in them, to enable some type of IoT functionality. All of them will be licensed, almost abolishing private ownership. If we idly accept licensing of everything, we will enjoy what will be basically serfdom. People that were writing these laws never imagined they would prevent you from repairing a cat-feeder or a lighting system. They were intended for another purpose entirely. Maybe it's time we stopped misusing those laws and created a separate body of law for this specifically.
- baybal2 7y ago
  > Withing the next 10-15 years 95% of household appliances and furniture will have a chip in them, to enable some type of IoT functionality. This is already happening. I work in an engineering consulting, specialising on consumer electronics. I have to admit, the wider industry is becoming a part of the issue: everybody wants to become like Apple. We have an enormous tide of new clients incoming, with prime majority of them having no previous experience doing anything with electronics whatsoever. If we ignore customers with out in the clouds fantasies, we will be losing like 3/4 of the new business, on another, we will be loosing our engineers who will be leaving to work on something more interesting and merit worthy. The hottest buzzword among Silicon Valley accelerator bred entrepreneurs I see is "product-as-a-service," which basically you buying a product, but still having to pay to use it even after you already own it. We have a joke that soon even toilet paper rolls will come chipped, and the paper will not work unless you pay somebody on the internet.
- nradov 7y ago
  Agreed on appliances, but I don't believe that 95% of new furniture like tables and couches will contain an IoT chip within 15 years. Hardly anyone is working on that.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    > I don't believe that 95% of new furniture like tables and couches will contain an IoT chip within 15 years. Hardly anyone is working on that. Unfortunately not: https://futureiot.tech/ikea-sets-up-smart-home-business-unit/ https://futureiot.tech/ikea-sets-up-smart-home-business-unit...
cs702 7y ago
I didn't even mention the words "licensing" and "banning." If a house, a car, a shirt, or a phone is offered to you for sale, and you buy it, then you should own it. FWIW, I agree with you. Please don't attack a straw-man!
- bitbldr 7y ago
  I think what previous comment was getting at is, most (all) of the time you buy a license to software, not the software itself
- jasode 7y ago
  >I didn't even mention the words "licensing" and "banning." Even if you don't mention them explicitly, you still have to acknowledge the difference because one of your examples was "software object". When consumers pay money for software, it almost always licensed and not bought. If you buy MS Windows 10 from Amazon.com, you purchased a license. If you truly want to "buy" Windows 10 in the same sense as your other non-software examples, you'd have to convince Microsoft to sell you the "ownership of the codebase" or have enough billions to acquire the entire Microsoft corporation to "own" Windows 10.
  - jablan 7y ago
    Expecting to get a "codebase" when buying a software product would be the same as expecting getting blueprints for all the parts your car is made of. The concept of "buying a licence" is forced and by no means the only possible, if one wants to use a piece of software.
    - jasode 7y ago
      I wasn't saying that consumers "expect" the source code when they so-called "buy" the software. I'm explaining an example of what copyright law already _is_ so mentioning "software objects" is already getting into discussion of licenses even if you don't use explicitly use the word "license". There are 2 meanings: - "buy software" the legal ownership sense : as in buying the copyright which is usually something companies (not consumers) do when they buy the intellectual property rights. E.g. Adobe Inc buys Macromedia Dreamweaver. This is the true ownership. - "buy software" the casual sense : which just means the consumer getting a CD or a digital download to install a copy of the software. This the license not the ownership. They are 2 different things that use the same word "buy" and just because a commentary omits the word "license" doesn't mean the above distinctions go away. It's a similar distinction for many types of intellectual property. Photographers of weddings usually don't let couples buy the wedding photos in a legal ownership sense. Instead, they sell some prints with a license for use. Same with musicians selling "songs" to the public. People bought a license and not the copyright. Paul McCartney doesn't even "own" the songs he wrote with The Beatles. Thus, Paul McCartney can't do "anything he wants" with the song "Yesterday". He can't "resell the song" to somebody else like a used book. Instead, he has to ask for Sony's permission. Does anyone "force" couples to license photos instead of buy them? In one sense, no. The bride & groom could conceivably contract with a photographer on a "work for hire" basis and thus own the copyrights to the photos. But most couples don't do that. Newspapers and magazines do establish "work for hire" with freelance photographers so they can own the photographs but most wedding couples don't. As other commenters mentioned, the real issue is the slippery word "buy" that defies consumers' natural intuition of what that means. If you're really leasing/renting/licensing something, you need to make that clear.
9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
We don't have to accept it, people aka the power of majority does the rules. I see no benefits or the people shilling it are doing a bad job. Either way it's for us to accept it or make the concepts.
- mathnovice 7y ago
  You are wrong. While the majority can create the rules the people that matter aren't the majority but creators and skilled professionals. When someone creates something they have absolute power over it until they reveal it to the world. They can even choose to destroy what they create rather than reveal it. When the majority (consumers) decide they want everything for free and that they want absolute power over the creations of others creators will simply stop revealing what they create and stop making their creations available for purchase. Instead creating things for private use.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    > When someone creates something they have absolute power over it until they reveal it to the world. The vast majority of these "creators and skilled professionals" are doing work for hire for the same people who own everything else, and have absolutely no control over the product of their labor.
    - jeremyjh 7y ago
      It doesn't matter whether the creator underwrites their own costs or a corporation does it, the same problem applies. If those who fund creative works cannot collect returns on their investment they will stop funding the work.

Licensing is not the same as purchasing. I don’t think banning the concept of licensing would be helpful.

imtringued 7y ago

I don't think banks would be happy if someone returned their "tuned" car after the lease ended.

short_sells_poo 7y ago
When you lease a car, you do not own it. The bank owns the car and depending on the country of residence, the dealership is possibly on the hook for a guaranteed buyout price. The lessee is certainly not allowed to "tune" the car without the consent of the bank/dealership. They are usually not even allowed to service it anywhere but at an authorized garage. This is different from outright purchase of the car, where you can literally drive it to the nearest scrap yard and have it crushed right after purchase :)
- falcolas 7y ago
  > This is different from outright purchase of the car Even this right is being eroded - see Tesla. You can drive it to the scrap yard, but someone else can't always drive it back out.
  - ajayyy 7y ago
    That's Tesla, which is one of the targets of right to repair

emiliobumachar 7y ago

I think it would be very helpful to demand that all leases are labeled properly. Where we are it says "Buy" on the ad, "Buy" on the button, and "Lease" deep inside the 30-page Terms Of Service. It's very reasonable to say that the vendors created an expectation of ownership to push their sale. If you didn't notice that I called them "vendors" instead of "leasers", it adds to my point.

Silhouette 7y ago

I don’t think banning the concept of licensing would be helpful. Other things being equal, I would agree. However, if market forces push us into a choice between ordinary people being able to own things and use them freely against ordinary people being forced to pay rent on everything forever and use things only as some higher power dictates, it's not going to take long to make that choice. This is the choice that we are heading towards with the increasing use of software and, in particular, the repurposing of laws originally intended to prevent exploiting the work of others to create software so that they constrain the ordinary use of a product by the person who bought it.

ClumsyPilot 7y ago

Withing the next 10-15 years 95% of household appliances and furniture will have a chip in them, to enable some type of IoT functionality. All of them will be licensed, almost abolishing private ownership. If we idly accept licensing of everything, we will enjoy what will be basically serfdom. People that were writing these laws never imagined they would prevent you from repairing a cat-feeder or a lighting system. They were intended for another purpose entirely. Maybe it's time we stopped misusing those laws and created a separate body of law for this specifically.

baybal2 7y ago
> Withing the next 10-15 years 95% of household appliances and furniture will have a chip in them, to enable some type of IoT functionality. This is already happening. I work in an engineering consulting, specialising on consumer electronics. I have to admit, the wider industry is becoming a part of the issue: everybody wants to become like Apple. We have an enormous tide of new clients incoming, with prime majority of them having no previous experience doing anything with electronics whatsoever. If we ignore customers with out in the clouds fantasies, we will be losing like 3/4 of the new business, on another, we will be loosing our engineers who will be leaving to work on something more interesting and merit worthy. The hottest buzzword among Silicon Valley accelerator bred entrepreneurs I see is "product-as-a-service," which basically you buying a product, but still having to pay to use it even after you already own it. We have a joke that soon even toilet paper rolls will come chipped, and the paper will not work unless you pay somebody on the internet.
nradov 7y ago
Agreed on appliances, but I don't believe that 95% of new furniture like tables and couches will contain an IoT chip within 15 years. Hardly anyone is working on that.
- baybal2 7y ago
  > I don't believe that 95% of new furniture like tables and couches will contain an IoT chip within 15 years. Hardly anyone is working on that. Unfortunately not: https://futureiot.tech/ikea-sets-up-smart-home-business-unit/ https://futureiot.tech/ikea-sets-up-smart-home-business-unit...

cs702 7y ago

I didn't even mention the words "licensing" and "banning." If a house, a car, a shirt, or a phone is offered to you for sale, and you buy it, then you should own it. FWIW, I agree with you. Please don't attack a straw-man!

bitbldr 7y ago
I think what previous comment was getting at is, most (all) of the time you buy a license to software, not the software itself
jasode 7y ago
>I didn't even mention the words "licensing" and "banning." Even if you don't mention them explicitly, you still have to acknowledge the difference because one of your examples was "software object". When consumers pay money for software, it almost always licensed and not bought. If you buy MS Windows 10 from Amazon.com, you purchased a license. If you truly want to "buy" Windows 10 in the same sense as your other non-software examples, you'd have to convince Microsoft to sell you the "ownership of the codebase" or have enough billions to acquire the entire Microsoft corporation to "own" Windows 10.
- jablan 7y ago
  Expecting to get a "codebase" when buying a software product would be the same as expecting getting blueprints for all the parts your car is made of. The concept of "buying a licence" is forced and by no means the only possible, if one wants to use a piece of software.
  - jasode 7y ago
    I wasn't saying that consumers "expect" the source code when they so-called "buy" the software. I'm explaining an example of what copyright law already _is_ so mentioning "software objects" is already getting into discussion of licenses even if you don't use explicitly use the word "license". There are 2 meanings: - "buy software" the legal ownership sense : as in buying the copyright which is usually something companies (not consumers) do when they buy the intellectual property rights. E.g. Adobe Inc buys Macromedia Dreamweaver. This is the true ownership. - "buy software" the casual sense : which just means the consumer getting a CD or a digital download to install a copy of the software. This the license not the ownership. They are 2 different things that use the same word "buy" and just because a commentary omits the word "license" doesn't mean the above distinctions go away. It's a similar distinction for many types of intellectual property. Photographers of weddings usually don't let couples buy the wedding photos in a legal ownership sense. Instead, they sell some prints with a license for use. Same with musicians selling "songs" to the public. People bought a license and not the copyright. Paul McCartney doesn't even "own" the songs he wrote with The Beatles. Thus, Paul McCartney can't do "anything he wants" with the song "Yesterday". He can't "resell the song" to somebody else like a used book. Instead, he has to ask for Sony's permission. Does anyone "force" couples to license photos instead of buy them? In one sense, no. The bride & groom could conceivably contract with a photographer on a "work for hire" basis and thus own the copyrights to the photos. But most couples don't do that. Newspapers and magazines do establish "work for hire" with freelance photographers so they can own the photographs but most wedding couples don't. As other commenters mentioned, the real issue is the slippery word "buy" that defies consumers' natural intuition of what that means. If you're really leasing/renting/licensing something, you need to make that clear.

9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago

We don't have to accept it, people aka the power of majority does the rules. I see no benefits or the people shilling it are doing a bad job. Either way it's for us to accept it or make the concepts.

mathnovice 7y ago
You are wrong. While the majority can create the rules the people that matter aren't the majority but creators and skilled professionals. When someone creates something they have absolute power over it until they reveal it to the world. They can even choose to destroy what they create rather than reveal it. When the majority (consumers) decide they want everything for free and that they want absolute power over the creations of others creators will simply stop revealing what they create and stop making their creations available for purchase. Instead creating things for private use.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  > When someone creates something they have absolute power over it until they reveal it to the world. The vast majority of these "creators and skilled professionals" are doing work for hire for the same people who own everything else, and have absolutely no control over the product of their labor.
  - jeremyjh 7y ago
    It doesn't matter whether the creator underwrites their own costs or a corporation does it, the same problem applies. If those who fund creative works cannot collect returns on their investment they will stop funding the work.