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Comment by toasterlovin | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it is the developer’s intellectual property, so they should have a say in how it’s used, right?

With traditional property, the vendor never had this right. I could buy a hammer and use it hammer in nails or use it to break windows and the hammer manufacturer couldn't stop me. It was one thing when intellectual property was entertainment and media but now that it's come to encompass tools needed to interact with the world users need to have something more akin to traditional consumer rights for apps they "own".

But intellectual property has traditionally been property for a long time. Copyright isn’t a recent invention.

You're applying copyright to something functional like a computer program versus a piece of art.

And what these companies are doing is making the (hardware or external) functionality dependent on that copy-written computer program. So now it's impossible to modify your device without modifying software and thus breaking copyright.

Take a look at the US constitution copyright clause:

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

How does this use case of copyright promote the progress of science and useful arts? Copyright was clearly intended to make it temporarily difficult to publish information, not to make it impossible to modify machines.

Property is a bundle of rights, not a single unified monolith.

But regardless of whether they should have that say, they empirically do seem to have it.

Which is why the solution is free software, and why the FSF has always understood the threat of hardware and encryption being used against the user rather than for them.

Not at all. I reject any and all notions of "intellectual property". Especially when their implementation requires the sacrifice of free computing as we know it, the destruction of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for. I'd very much prefer that creators have zero say over anything, if that is the cost of computers remaining free.

No.

Yes, they should have a say. This is "the final word". There's a large gap of rationality in between them.

Copyright is often bound up with the moral rights of authors, one of which is final control of whether and how their work is exhibited, because the author's reputation is bound up with the exhibition of the work. This is more explicit in jurisdictions like European countries, where authors rights are more encoded into IP law.

In the USA, you have things like the first sale doctrine, which applies to things like books and audio recordings, but DOES NOT apply to software, especially not software that makes use of services provided by the author (as most mobile apps do). Do not expect, in general, to have a right to use a piece of software, especially a mobile app, in ways not explicitly authorized by the app's vendor. Yes, this also means video games as things you can play forever are going away. Get used to it.

> so they should have a say in how it’s used

users should, that's why feedback forms exist

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