10 ms·

I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, ma

I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this.

fsflover 3y ago
Here is how a small company has done it: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/ https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/.
codetrotter 3y ago
> many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this So plan ahead. For the 2024 model of each iPhone, get all the permissions to release all of the firmware in year 2032.
- thrashh 3y ago
  The usual concern with regulation is not the big players. 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.
  - asddubs 3y ago
    releasing the firmware primarily would affect the chip makers, phone manufacturers generally do not write this code themselves.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Not sure how much weight this really has in a market such as mobile phones in which additional external competitors are never going to become a reality.
    - wongarsu 3y ago
      OnePlus was a nobody when they launched the OnePlus One in 2014. They could have easily gone out of business. 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_manufacturers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_manufact...
  - oblio 3y ago
    Thankfully people here are asking for good regulation, once which states that at some point in the future every phone ever sold in market X needs to have its core software open sourced, so companies can plan ahead.
    - astrange 3y ago
      The EU isn't making good regulation, they don't have any tech companies and are just attempting to make it illegal to make anything in a fit of pique. The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore. 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.)
      - stavros 3y ago
        I've been trying to find words to describe this take but I fail. It's as if someone thought "what's the most jingoistic thing I can say in support of the US and its anti-regulation free-for-all?".
        astrange 3y ago
        The US isn't the only country with tech companies. You may have heard of China, Japan, or Korea. And every country regulates cell phones in particular, since they use shared airwaves, have rare earth metals in them, sometimes have exploding batteries etc.
      - webmobdev 3y ago
        The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore. 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?
  - rtsil 3y ago
    That argument is often used in bad faith/FUD by the big players themselves to halt any regulation attempts. 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.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - fsflover 3y ago
    There are already small businesses that do this: Purism and Pine64.
  - rendaw 3y ago
    How would _this_ regulation raise the cost of entry? At worst they'd just have to release the source code for the firmware they wrote (putting source code on github takes maybe 5m).
    - thrashh 3y ago
      Source code probably involves libraries from other companies and covers patents owned by other people. No one is building a product from complete scratch.
      - the8472 3y ago
        Those suppliers would be subject to the same regulations when supplying to the big players. They should have all that stuff already available once it's in force.
burntwater 3y ago
If the owners/companies no longer exist, then I would think the IP should be free by default. Perhaps that's another law to work on...
- arcbyte 3y ago
  In 2010 you start a company, wholly owned by you. 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.
  - gbear605 3y ago
    The purpose of a patent, generally speaking, is to encourage innovation by giving the creator legally protected time in which they can exclusively use that innovation. If they don’t use the innovation but someone else wants to, society is improved by dissolving that patent, even if the owner could theoretically be traced to some person.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Society is not improved if a beaurocrat can nullify people's inventions. Who decides what "using" is? Why do we need to pay taxes to employ those people? We have patent law, which is already a lovely gravy train for the state.
      - horsawlarway 3y ago
pinusc 3y ago
It would require doing things slightly differently, such as hardware vendors having to buy the rights to redistribute firmware blobs / source code... just because it's hard it doesn't matter it can't happen. After all, if physical components can be brought together to make a product, why can't software licenses move with them? One could also imagine radically different IP laws concerning firmware or even software.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Software is replicable. It might open up companies' IP to worldwide competition. That's the difference from hardware.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    We're talking about firmware which is device-specific, which is why it has to be released separately for each device. 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.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      But there is still a difference between software and hardware. This is like saying that for every hardware device I should be able to also spin up my own factory to produce it, and have that bundled into the purchase price.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        I feel like you're missing the context. 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.
Draiken 3y ago
It's hard to see it happening with how things work today. If companies had to do this they would make an effort to figure it out.
- deelowe 3y ago
  How? How exactly would they figure it out? As someone who works in hardware development full time, often supporting older hardware, I don't see how this is feasible. Most of the IP we work on requires 3 or more parties to be part of the NDA.
  - Draiken 3y ago
    I have no idea. But I know it's not a law of physics so it can definitely be changed. 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.
brazzledazzle 3y ago
It might be difficult to release it with an open source license like GPL or MIT but the company already has rights to copy and distribute it.
hamandcheese 3y ago
If we are talking about making new laws, why not just modify the law to exclude firmware from any IP protection. i.e. compel disclosure of the firmware, and also ensure the device manufacturer is protected from any lawsuits arising out of such disclosure.
surgical_fire 3y ago
That's the beauty of regulation. 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.
gigel82 3y ago
How about as part of FCC approvals you submit everything needed to unlock the device, and it goes into a vault for X years than gets automatically released.
ilyt 3y ago
Then you don't get to sell your e-waste in EU. That's enough motivation for them to do.
slim 3y ago
How about a rule that says you have no intellectual property whatsoever on my phone if you don't maintain it for a year. I would be free to decompile it recompile it and make it opendource
javajosh 3y ago
The normal neoliberal solution is to wait for a new company with a new design to meet the demand for repairable, open devices. This is already happening, and I am convinced will eventually replace ALL proprietary blobs and silicon. This is especially true as the barriers-to-entry keep lowering. The only way this won't happen is if government and the tightly coupled industrial interests prevent it by fiat. This is more likely than you think, since control of these devices is far, far more important than most people realize. Smartphones are crucial for the tracking and control of both large populations and also problematic individuals. In theory they could lead to perfect law-enforcement, which should terrify everyone. Letting the space open up is to give up central authority's invaluable tactical and strategic advantage over distributed authority.
anigbrowl 3y ago
Easily fixed by assuming that if an IP owner no longer exists or cannot be find, their ownership interest may be reasonably presumed to have expired. It's only hard because people insist on keeping it that way.
colordrops 3y ago
This could grandfather existing phones. Future phones would need to trace providence of IP and get requisite permissions.
pwg 3y ago
IP permissions, i.e., copyrights, are not natural rights, they are instead government "grants" of protection. And protection granted by government decree can also be taken away by government decree. 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.
- skissane 3y ago
  > 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
  - 6510 3y ago
    Throw in a code review.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "IP permissions, i.e., copyrights, are not natural rights, they are instead government "grants" of protection" There's no such thing as a natural right, period. They're all imaginary creations of humans.
  - toyg 3y ago
lrem 3y ago
Nah, the government can change the law. The obstacle to overcome would be the software quality. Today your driver is a hairball stuck with chewing gum to a point release of everything. In the case of a smallest change of anything it goes up in flames. That’s something harder to overcome by decree. Needs incentives in place.
dminuoso 3y ago
The modern supply chains behave this way precisely because no such requirements exist. It’s a typical facade argument you might hear from politicians when they parrot lobbiysts.
seu 3y ago
> I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this. Exactly the reason to force manufacturers to change their supply chains.
yc-kraln 3y ago
The firmware source needs to be put into escrow for any device with more than N sales; where N is 10k or 50k or 100k.

fsflover 3y ago

Here is how a small company has done it: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/ https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/.

codetrotter 3y ago

> many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this So plan ahead. For the 2024 model of each iPhone, get all the permissions to release all of the firmware in year 2032.

thrashh 3y ago
The usual concern with regulation is not the big players. 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.
- asddubs 3y ago
  releasing the firmware primarily would affect the chip makers, phone manufacturers generally do not write this code themselves.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Not sure how much weight this really has in a market such as mobile phones in which additional external competitors are never going to become a reality.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    OnePlus was a nobody when they launched the OnePlus One in 2014. They could have easily gone out of business. 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_manufacturers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_manufact...
- oblio 3y ago
  Thankfully people here are asking for good regulation, once which states that at some point in the future every phone ever sold in market X needs to have its core software open sourced, so companies can plan ahead.
  - astrange 3y ago
    The EU isn't making good regulation, they don't have any tech companies and are just attempting to make it illegal to make anything in a fit of pique. The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore. 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.)
    - stavros 3y ago
      I've been trying to find words to describe this take but I fail. It's as if someone thought "what's the most jingoistic thing I can say in support of the US and its anti-regulation free-for-all?".
      - astrange 3y ago
        The US isn't the only country with tech companies. You may have heard of China, Japan, or Korea. And every country regulates cell phones in particular, since they use shared airwaves, have rare earth metals in them, sometimes have exploding batteries etc.
    - webmobdev 3y ago
      The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore. 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?
- rtsil 3y ago
  That argument is often used in bad faith/FUD by the big players themselves to halt any regulation attempts. 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- fsflover 3y ago
  There are already small businesses that do this: Purism and Pine64.
- rendaw 3y ago
  How would _this_ regulation raise the cost of entry? At worst they'd just have to release the source code for the firmware they wrote (putting source code on github takes maybe 5m).
  - thrashh 3y ago
    Source code probably involves libraries from other companies and covers patents owned by other people. No one is building a product from complete scratch.
    - the8472 3y ago
      Those suppliers would be subject to the same regulations when supplying to the big players. They should have all that stuff already available once it's in force.

burntwater 3y ago

If the owners/companies no longer exist, then I would think the IP should be free by default. Perhaps that's another law to work on...

arcbyte 3y ago
In 2010 you start a company, wholly owned by you. 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.
- gbear605 3y ago
  The purpose of a patent, generally speaking, is to encourage innovation by giving the creator legally protected time in which they can exclusively use that innovation. If they don’t use the innovation but someone else wants to, society is improved by dissolving that patent, even if the owner could theoretically be traced to some person.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Society is not improved if a beaurocrat can nullify people's inventions. Who decides what "using" is? Why do we need to pay taxes to employ those people? We have patent law, which is already a lovely gravy train for the state.
    - horsawlarway 3y ago

pinusc 3y ago

It would require doing things slightly differently, such as hardware vendors having to buy the rights to redistribute firmware blobs / source code... just because it's hard it doesn't matter it can't happen. After all, if physical components can be brought together to make a product, why can't software licenses move with them? One could also imagine radically different IP laws concerning firmware or even software.

robertlagrant 3y ago
Software is replicable. It might open up companies' IP to worldwide competition. That's the difference from hardware.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  We're talking about firmware which is device-specific, which is why it has to be released separately for each device. 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.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    But there is still a difference between software and hardware. This is like saying that for every hardware device I should be able to also spin up my own factory to produce it, and have that bundled into the purchase price.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      I feel like you're missing the context. 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.

Draiken 3y ago

It's hard to see it happening with how things work today. If companies had to do this they would make an effort to figure it out.

deelowe 3y ago
How? How exactly would they figure it out? As someone who works in hardware development full time, often supporting older hardware, I don't see how this is feasible. Most of the IP we work on requires 3 or more parties to be part of the NDA.
- Draiken 3y ago
  I have no idea. But I know it's not a law of physics so it can definitely be changed. 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.

brazzledazzle 3y ago

It might be difficult to release it with an open source license like GPL or MIT but the company already has rights to copy and distribute it.

hamandcheese 3y ago

If we are talking about making new laws, why not just modify the law to exclude firmware from any IP protection. i.e. compel disclosure of the firmware, and also ensure the device manufacturer is protected from any lawsuits arising out of such disclosure.

surgical_fire 3y ago

That's the beauty of regulation. 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.

gigel82 3y ago

How about as part of FCC approvals you submit everything needed to unlock the device, and it goes into a vault for X years than gets automatically released.

ilyt 3y ago

Then you don't get to sell your e-waste in EU. That's enough motivation for them to do.

slim 3y ago

How about a rule that says you have no intellectual property whatsoever on my phone if you don't maintain it for a year. I would be free to decompile it recompile it and make it opendource

javajosh 3y ago

The normal neoliberal solution is to wait for a new company with a new design to meet the demand for repairable, open devices. This is already happening, and I am convinced will eventually replace ALL proprietary blobs and silicon. This is especially true as the barriers-to-entry keep lowering. The only way this won't happen is if government and the tightly coupled industrial interests prevent it by fiat. This is more likely than you think, since control of these devices is far, far more important than most people realize. Smartphones are crucial for the tracking and control of both large populations and also problematic individuals. In theory they could lead to perfect law-enforcement, which should terrify everyone. Letting the space open up is to give up central authority's invaluable tactical and strategic advantage over distributed authority.

anigbrowl 3y ago

Easily fixed by assuming that if an IP owner no longer exists or cannot be find, their ownership interest may be reasonably presumed to have expired. It's only hard because people insist on keeping it that way.

colordrops 3y ago

This could grandfather existing phones. Future phones would need to trace providence of IP and get requisite permissions.

pwg 3y ago

IP permissions, i.e., copyrights, are not natural rights, they are instead government "grants" of protection. And protection granted by government decree can also be taken away by government decree. 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.

skissane 3y ago
> 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
- 6510 3y ago
  Throw in a code review.
pmoriarty 3y ago
"IP permissions, i.e., copyrights, are not natural rights, they are instead government "grants" of protection" There's no such thing as a natural right, period. They're all imaginary creations of humans.
- toyg 3y ago

lrem 3y ago

Nah, the government can change the law. The obstacle to overcome would be the software quality. Today your driver is a hairball stuck with chewing gum to a point release of everything. In the case of a smallest change of anything it goes up in flames. That’s something harder to overcome by decree. Needs incentives in place.

dminuoso 3y ago

The modern supply chains behave this way precisely because no such requirements exist. It’s a typical facade argument you might hear from politicians when they parrot lobbiysts.

seu 3y ago

> I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this. Exactly the reason to force manufacturers to change their supply chains.

yc-kraln 3y ago

The firmware source needs to be put into escrow for any device with more than N sales; where N is 10k or 50k or 100k.