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Comment by thomasfl | Hacker News Reader

There should be a limit for ten years that manufacturer was allowed to restrict access to their devices. After ten years has gone, manufacturers should be required to publish software to help owners jailbreak their devices. Think about it. All game consoles and cell phones in use today will be bricked in ten years from now if they are not jailbroken.

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I like the idea of all computing devices being legally-required to have a button that wipes the device and unlocks the bootloader and everything. That way, 1) company secrets are kept safe, but you can still commandeer the hardware you own when you wish, and 2) access to forensic data on stolen devices is still restricted.

Company secrets shouldn't get any protection at all, maybe other than suing the employee who leaked them for damages. The laws we have today give you the same protection as patents but cheaper, indefinite and without having to disclose anything. That breaks the original tradeoff patents were designed for - legal protection in exchange for making your inventions public.

Your code becoming open source after 10 years should be treated as the cost of doing business, same as a copyright or patent expiring.

Considering that many consoles are initially sold at a loss, but then can begin to make a profit as the hardware becomes outdated (among other things [1])...

What about making it a requirement after some time. What about, after the warranty runs out. And hey, that could also incentivize longer warranties!

> [1] "Typically, when a new games console launches its price point is below the actual cost of manufacturing. But over time, through a combination of bulk component orders and the refining of the hardware design, the cost falls below the retail price. The PS3 was sold at a loss for nearly four years, the PS4 was profitable within six months of its launch, and the PS5 has taken eight months. Considering the novel new design and global chip shortages, that's quite impressive." https://uk.pcmag.com/gaming-systems/134885/sony-says-499-ps5...

> The manufacturer typically uses anticompetitive business practices, so they should be allowed to use more anticompetitive business practices

Or we could say that product tying is illegal, which it already is. Why do we care about specific monopolistic manufacturers' business strategies for mid tier commodity computers? It should be plainly illegal for Nintendo to try to stop people from running a Nintendo game on a Sony or a Dell computer, or to stop Sony from writing a game for a Nintendo computer. Or for Sony to stop Nintendo from doing those things. There's literally no reason to support this "you need a special X brand computer to run X games." If they can't sell hardware on their own merits, it's because they're not good at hardware, and you were being forced to buy it for the software you wanted.

You're not thinking capitalistically enough. It's part of the State of Things (tm) to have purchased things come and go. One day you can use them and another they are gone. Just as in nature, would you be surprised if you took a tomato and it stopped being good after a few weeks? Well, software is a bit like a tomato actually.

So yeah, pay us to give you "Super Mario NES Remake HD 2.1 Lite Remix Classic Super 4K Director's Cut" for just $169.99.

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