Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

Or instead of consumer rights taking a loss, the company that failed to protect its property does.

Consumer rights haven't taken a loss because there is no consumer and no rights. Users have no right to use stolen property. The have rights when they legitimately acquire the product.

Even if its changed hands, its still illegal to purchase stolen property and the police will just take it from you without compensating you.

The loss is that DRM is added to a product, which means that even if you legally purchased it, you don't really own it.

You never "really owned" a TV because they were never open source. If the feature never activates, it never affects the user in any way and it may as well not exist. If it does activate wrongly, you have consumer law and protections to get your money back.

I'd argue that serial number checks would be the company protecting it's property. It would be far better if the company could rely on the state to protect its property.

I also really don't see activation lock as consumer rights taking a loss, thieves aren't consumers. Being able to brick hardware that thieves steal is a consumer protection. If EVGA started to block resale, that would be a completely different story, but I was happy to activation lock my stolen iPhone. Apple lets you resell, but if you steal a truck load of iPhones I doubt they would activate.

"I'd argue that serial number checks would be the company protecting it's property"

No, its the company compelling me to protect it's property at my expense using my CPU and my Internet connection without compensation or due process.

I mean doesn't Microsoft already phone home a unique GUID identifying the hardware in your computer that it ties Windows key activations to? And since Microsoft owns Canonical, probably in Ubuntu as well (on the defaults)?

Citation on how MS owns ubuntu ?

And what compensation would you think would be fair exactly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com