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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
Best. Of. Cory Doctorow’s essays (with sh*t i had no idea about)
Best. Of. Cory Doctorow’s essays (with sh*t i had no idea about)
The “meaning” if it can even be called that is just a really unhinged rant hating on the fact that cars have computers in them despite seemingly having zero understanding of automobile design, consumer market research, or economics.
There’s a lot of BS in there, but here’s my takeaway:
For example, if I want to make an arcade cabinet, I need to get permission from all of the rights holders of each game, even if those games aren’t available for sale today. If copyright expired after a reasonable time (say, 5-10 years), I could make competitive products.
Another example is that if I buy a movie, I cannot legally buy tools to break the encryption to make a backup. So if my disk breaks, I’m SOL and need to buy another. So I do not truly own the thing I bought.
Or for the example of cars, if I buy a car today that has hardware for heating my seats, I cannot use those seat warmers unless I pay to unlock them. I cannot do that because the company owns the IP for the system to enable it and I have to pay to access that closed system. If they didn’t have such strong protections, I could buy cracked software to break whatever stupid encryption they have.
And so on. I think the comparison with feudalism is silly (this is different, though if you squint it’s related), but I see that as largely SEO and rage-baiting.
The real argument is useful, and here’s my takeaway:
Yeah, but fixing IP law is a much more broad problem than computers and cars, and is honestly approached much more cleanly through the lens of basically anything else it applies to in the consumer market. Because frankly, cars are not only one of the least user-serviceable items people own simply due to complexity and price, but also the truly bad practices are honestly pretty narrow in scope, with most people not driving cars that have the aforementioned user-facing issues.
It also doesn’t really help that the article leads with an utterly uninformed and reductive summary of the chip shortage and goes on to complain that an integrated GPS system… has access to it’s own location.
And don’t get me wrong, IP law is a massive issue, and you’ll be hard pressed to find me defending it as it exists, but this article is just a terrible argument against it. The strongest point are the links to other people making better arguments.
Cars are absolutely user-serviceable. I do pretty much all of my own maintenance, and I’m not all that mechanically inclined, I just watch YouTube videos and follow along. All you need is a set of wrenches and screwdrivers and you can do most regular repairs.
It’s a lot easier imo to do most car repairs than replace a phone screen imo. With a screen repair, you need finesse with a heat gun and be careful with ribbon cables.
The problem with modern cars and phones though isn’t the Inherent complexity, but the artificial complexity from vendors locking things down. As in, they pair components cryptographically and it’s illegal to distribute tools for profit that break that encryption. If they provided the tools to pair components, it wouldn’t be an issue, but they hide behind IP and DMCA protections, which essentially locks you into their service.
That’s kind of what the article was getting at imo. Vendors are finding new ways to lock you in instead of retaining you with a better product. So companies are trying to get the benefits of being a monopoly through technical and legal means.