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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> It probably shouldn't even be legal,

Why should it be illegal to sell a product on whatever terms you want? Sony got sued because they advertised one set of terms but changed them after the fact. That's reasonable. But it's not like Apple purports to do anything other than sell a locked down device. What's wrong with that?

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Since you brought up Apple... How is it that Apple was legally bound to sell the FaceTime app for Mac OS X, or the 802.11n update, because adding new features to an already sold product crossed some weird accounting issue, but Sony had to be sued when they removed an advertised feature and forced to compensate for the loss?

The law doesn't make sense most of the time.

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-launches-0-99-mac-...

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/apples-0-99-facetime-cha...

> What's wrong with that?

The undermining of private property rights comes to mind.

A property right is a "bundle of sticks."[1] It's a bundle of things you're allowed to do with respect to a piece of property. It is wholly legitimate to sell bundles with a subset of all possible sticks. E.g. a railroad might keep the surface rights to some land, but sell the air rights so a building can be built over its tracks.

Apple selling you a locked-down piece of hardware does not undermine your property rights. You get to freely exercise all the rights you purchased. Nothing is forcing you to buy a bundle of sticks that doesn't have the specific sticks you want.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_of_rights.

DRM claws back property rights; breaking it is illegal, regardless of whether its protecting something that you would otherwise have the legal right to do.

I call bullshit. Up, down, right, left and center. So much bullshit.

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