The End of Ownership: Why You Need to Fight America’s Copyright Laws

[unhappycamper]

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/01/174071/

The End of Ownership: Why You Need to Fight America’s Copyright Laws
By Kyle Wiens
01.17.14
9:30 AM

Just the other day, I got a card in the mail for my 30th birthday. When I opened it up, the card started singing “Happy Birthday.” And that little thing — pealing out at the top of its automated lungs — made me laugh. What a strange thing to computerize.

But it suddenly occurred to me that this silly card was the perfect example of what I call The Law of Electronic Eventuality: If something can have a computer in it, eventually it will have a computer in it. Our physical objects aren’t just physical anymore. Code runs unseen through phones, watches, smoke alarms, birthday cards, and more like connective tissue. As with muscle, it’s that connective tissue that makes a thing work.

Without code, without software, our Things become inert. Dead.

While this ushers in a whole new world of possibilities, it’s also redefining ownership. Because when you purchase a physical object, you don’t actually buy the software in it — that code belongs to someone else. If you do something the manufacturer doesn’t like — repair it, hack it, unlock it — you could lose the right to use “their” software in “your” thing. And as these lines between physical and digital blur, it pits copyright and physical ownership rights against each other.

[msongs]

1. well you could always make your own software instead :-) nt

[bemildred]

2. This is why I don't like putting computers in everything.

It makes them less self-contained, more fragile, impossible to repair at times, and more expensive. And it's mostly driven by marketing and profit, it's cheap and you can add bazzilions of "features" to sell with. How many clocks are there in your house now? How many times do you have to reset them?