this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Although I enthusiastically agree, that's a little off-topic to be the takeaway from this particular kind of article.
In this case, the issue to be outraged about is that the corporations are violating our property rights in order to engage in illegal rentiership. As owners, we have the right to modify our own property, including to unlock the full potential of the physical machine, and no amount of DRM or the DMCA anti-circumvention clause should be allowed to change that!
That doesn't need any kind of new "right to repair" or anything either; it is inherent to the definitions of what "property" and "ownership" are! I mean sure, we should impose requirements for products to be better designed for repairability and have documentation and spare parts available, but lots of people seem to think what Mecedes etc. are doing is currently within their rights, and that's just crazy talk. These things aren't legitimate subscriptions; they're a protection racket! Trying to hold capabilities hostage that the device owner already paid for (by virtue of having bought the physical device) is literally criminal and company executives ought to be going to prison for it.
Anyway, to get back to addessing your comment: even if we do fix the zoning code to make cities walkable (which we definitely should do, by the way) and cars become a niche product that only rural people and folks who have to drive around as part of their job have, it still doesn't fix this issue because (a) it's important to protect the rights of owners even of niche products, and even more importantly (b) cars are hardly the only product category that manufacturers are trying to pull this shit in anyway.
TL;DR: stopping the erosion of ownership and fixing car dependency are orthogonal issues, this article is concerned with the former, and your suggestion only addresses the latter.
Hear, hear. This isn't a case of Mercedes selling an upgrade. It's more akin to selling the car pre-booted and then demanding a monthly payment to remove it under threat of returning to re-apply it if a payment is missed. It's absolutely a protection racket. Sure would be a shame if something happened to those fancy features we installed.
The good news is that the companies who will float this first are the ones most likely to do business with politicians, and unfortunately I'm cynical enough to believe that the best way to get regulation in place is to personally inconvenience the decision-makers. I hope that results in action.
If it doesn't, well, the next step is self-help. If we're changing the definition of private property, it's only so long before people begin questioning whether there's any point in having private property at all.
Damn ok. Yeah I get what you mean.
I don't think the problem is the companies necessarily though, or the erosion of ownership... The problem is ownership, private property and private production. As long as we're dependent on private companies making our means of transportation, and as long as we insist on owning them, the more they will have leverage over what we can and can't do with them. The only solution, in my view, is to remove ownership entirely, and simply provide a product to the public, that is shared and used and "owned" by the community rather than the property of an individual. Hence public transport.
Fundamentally I suppose the fix wouldn't be very different regardless of the perspective on the issue.
Still, companies do have a right to do this, at this time, and I think it's dangerously delusional to deny it. It's indeed "crazy talk", as you put it, but that's because capitalism is a crazy system that shouldn't be allowed to continue! Protect the rights of the people by providing them with their rights, rather than having them buy them from Mercedes.
On the contrary: there's a very important distinction that I'm trying to make between an entity having the "right" to do something and merely being able to "get away with" doing it. The framing of issues matters, and I believe ceding control of said framing to the neofeudalists is far more dangerous than being accused of "delusion" for pointing out the way things are supposed to be instead of accepting the corrupt status quo at face value.
Ok, I think you have a point there.
I still think it's meaningless though. "A fine is a price". If they can get away with it, they can do it. I don't think there's much of a point in relying on legislation to determine whether something should be done or not. Fundamentally, whether they have a right to it or not, they shouldn't do it. Meaning they shouldn't have that right, if they do.
"The way things are supposed to be" according to who? Capital? The law, written by capital?