General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I am sincerely perplexed by the "it's not an assault rifle" meme... [View all]Igel
(37,282 posts)They were legal. They were also easy to obtain, fairly cheaply. (Strictly speaking, they still are legal, so it's not a perfect comparison. Just good enough.)
Now you make new ones. The company hasn't made and shipped them for a few years. You can only sell ones that were bought from the company before the company owning the patent withdrew the product from the market and sat on the patent.
It's totally not illegal to own one of those little gadgets. But 99% of the stuff you'd probably use it for is illegal. (Yeah, it does some conversions, but really, people bought them to circumvent anti-piracy safeguards.) You can find them on eBay and Amazon. They cost a lot more than they did 5 years ago and the price goes up every year, simply because every year there are fewer available on the market.
Same with the upgrade kits. You can own them and sell them, if they were made before they were declared illegal. But 99% of what you'd use them for is illegal. And, barring illegal imports, every year the price goes up because every year there are fewer that could be sold.
You're trying to argue from individual instances to a conclusion, a arrive at a pre-determined generalization, but the logic won't can't get you there. The generalization you'd arrive at is much more limited and, in fact, self-limiting.