Traditionally, goods are subject to the first sale doctrine--once I buy a shirt, it's my property, and if I want to sell or rent it, I can. It's mine.
But software is licensed. When I buy a piece of software, I'm actually paying for a limited and revokable right to use someone else's property. And now companies are putting software into more and more goods.
As software is eating the world, it is also eating our concept of what it means to buy and own things.
Amazon in 2009 remotely deleted George Orwell books (you can't make this up) from customer Kindles without asking first. Amazon didn't need the customers' permission because a Kindle book is legally a license, not a piece of property.
John Deere tractors have been prized by farmers for their durability and flexibility. Now they come with software and a prohibition against customer modification or repair.
It sounds silly but the right to repair our own property is under threat. It's now something that we need to fight for.
And now apparently even paying $100,000 will not be enough to give full ownership rights to a car.
It's up to us.
I would add, though, that whether the next generation accepts it or not is not really the problem. It won't likely be viewed as a positive thing, whether they accept it or not. Why should the next generation have to accept something that is a net negative for them, just because the current generation has decided for them that it's how it's going to be?
The next generation will just get cancer as often as we do. Why bother trying to curb smoking. (okay, this one would be for my grandparents).
Sure we don't like taxation without representation, but the next generation will grow up with and won't mind. Why bother changing it.
Obviously the answers to these questions vary, but few people will answer "Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, always, if you could get a deed to the Earth you could feed us all to the dogs".
And the new generations believe in the sacred rights of the capital class less and less.
But my cars take me wherever I want to go, my music makes me feel good, my phone helps me in a multitude of ways and my apartment is great and, hopefully, my house will be too. They get the job done.
Is there a risk that the owning party (who sometimes don't even own the stuff they're selling!) can take everything away? Of course. But it's rare enough for me to not worry about. If I can't make my car payments, I've got bigger problems.
OK, but how are they actually doing it? What kind of papers do they have to make such demands?
I naively believe that if I just "buy a car", it is the vendor's obligation to ensure that "the car" includes a perpetual and irrevocable license to use for any purpose all of the 1st and/or 3rd party software required for the operation of the hardware. I am buying a functional car and I don't care how it's made inside, it simply must work and be legal to use in any way one would use a car.
Or is it customary nowadays that buying a car involves separately (even if from the same vendor) purchasing hardware and licensing software for it, on two different pieces of paper?
Basically, it's a car manufacturer telling you you can't drive certain people for a certain reason from and to certain places. This is way more invasive than a lot of what I have seen, and I live in an ex socialist country where the military/intelligence powers have more influence than the political.
I would understand this if they had something like a SIM lock where a carrier sells you a phone at a loss and forces you to use their SIM, but Tesla owners are paying the full amount. To be blunt: if we're in a brothel and you're not paying, you have no business telling me with whom to go upstairs.
Liability with respect to the operation of physical products is well understood. There are private standards that insurance companies and courts are familiar with (for example: Underwriter Labs, NIST, NSF, ANSI). If your product passes the relevant standard, and a customer causes harm with the product, then you've got a great argument that your company should not be held liable for that harm.
Software licenses almost always just try to disclaim any and all liability entirely. "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS-IS AND IS NOT FIT FOR ANY PURPOSE"--anyone who has read a software license has probably seen language like that.
Then on top of that, software is increasingly networked with centralized services. Tesla's self-driving technology, as described so far, will be dependent on data made available over the network--like whether the radar return at a given location is a known billboard. So liability will attach to not just the car, not just the software, but also the real-time service run by Tesla.
Companies use liability as a major reason to restrict the rights of consumers. We need industry and legal frameworks to allocate liability for software and services like we have for physical goods.
It looks like they are attempting to prohibit driving people for money, not connecting the car to unauthorized software. "Revenue purposes" is the exact words they used.
Their lies don't become any more compelling when you repeat them.
I don't think there's any difference. In order to make your Tesla able to drive for Uber, you're going to need to do something to it. That's what they're prohibiting. If you yourself want to drive for Uber, they are fine with that. But they don't want you modifying the car to drive for Uber by itself.
I think that's a good thing because it allows Tesla to receive an income that is closer to the value they have created.
The value of a Blu-ray disc bought to watch at home is about $15. The value of a Blu-ray disc bought to play in a movie theatre is much higher. It's great that the movie studio can place restrictions on how you use the Blu-ray because it means the studio receives an income closer to the total value they have created. If there were no such restrictions the movie industry would be smaller and would make fewer movies.
The value of an autonomous Tesla car bought for private use is about $60,000. The value of an autonomous Tesla car bought for ride-sharing is much higher. It's great that Tesla can place restrictions on how you use the car because it means they receive an income closer to the total value they have created. If there were no such restrictions the car industry would be smaller and would make fewer autonomous cars.
If you feel it's wrong to place restrictions on the use of a Blu-ray, what is the benefit that outweighs having a smaller movie industry and fewer movies available to consumers?
If you feel it's OK to place restrictions on the use of a Blu-ray but not on an autonomous Tesla, what's the difference?
Oh, except that value was created by the person using the car not the car itself, which just sits there until someone does something. That person does all the work and assumes all the risk, so why should Ford be rewarded for their effort?
Do you want to go to Home Depot and pay different prices for nails based on the value of the building you're going to build with them? This rabbit hole goes a long way down.
But if Ford was to develop something better than any other car company - say, a car with the greatest acceleration - I would like them to be able to charge different price depending on whether the purchaser is the police force or a car racing team.
Nails are very much a commodity product, so once again competition would prohibit the supplier from charging much more than the cost of production. But let's say that a chemical company developed a superior adhesive such that a carpenter could save an hour on some types of construction jobs. The value of a carpenter's time is much more in the United States than in Indonesia, so I would like the chemical company to be able to charge much more for the same adhesive in the US compared to Indonesia.
This isn't really how free markets work, though; either it's a competitive market in which the profit margin tends to zero, or (especially for SV unicorns) it's a monopoly or market-dominating company that gets to charge monopoly prices.
The market valuation for Uber isn't based on today's profits, it's the expected value of a string of future profits which can only be realised without strong competition. Likewise Tesla. Only one of them can win.
(The argument that DRM on blu-rays enlarge the movie industry really needs substantiating and accounting for the increased cost of blu-rays and players. This is separate from the copyright rules on public performance of recordings.)
1) Goods powered by software are frequently much better than goods without. I mean, compare a phone with software vs. without. Compare a car with software vs. without. Which one would you rather have?
2) Entire industries are converting to software-based capability. Speaking of phones and cars, try to find a new one these days without software in it.
I think we have to adjust, as a society.
It's an issue of patent, copyright and rent seeking. We are so far down that rabbit hole globally, and governments have given far too much for it to be recoverable. Who do I vote for to get wholesale scaling back of IP law? What do I do knowing there's unlikely to be candidates promoting this stance?
Or, we start demanding that software, when purchased as part of a physical device, does not reduce the rights customers have to their physical device.
Im not saying its hard to find them yet, but at this point 2 out of 3 toasters at my local grocery store have software in them - simple software, not connected, but software nonetheless, in a device that needs none, a device that has worked mechanically for decades with no issue... Everything is going that way though, becuase its easier to design something with software rather than figuring out how to make a piece of machinery make a decision mechanically - it easier to just use sensors and software...
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that is true either. I am probably more politically active than most, in that I will actually contact my representatives about issues I consider important. My representatives have, in some cases, been more tech savvy than most as well. And yet still there is little real change in technical fields, because the overwhelming majority of politicians are not aware of the real issues and implications and the briefings they get come from the very big businesses who stand to gain the most from additional laws and variations on the theme of regulatory capture. If the only people running in an election are all like that, who do you vote for if you want something else?
I see a few plausible ways to improve the situation. Firstly, voting with our wallets works if and when there are better alternatives available, and sadly is often far more flexible, far more effective and far more quickly effective than voting in an election.
Secondly, if we can raise the issues to a high enough level of public awareness that they start to become politically relevant, then the politicians will start caring enough to get better briefings and explore more points of view. The danger with this one is that with technology issues, people often only start to care when something significant and bad happens to them personally or to someone close to them, and it may be far too late to fix the underlying problems by then.
One of the possibilities I find most interesting is that in the current political climate in the West, the established political classes are deeply unpopular, and in some cases rival movements are picking up serious interest even if they're a little bit crazy just because they're not the old guard. This also leaves the door open for much more savvy people to enter politics who might never have considered doing so before, and if even a few people who care deeply about some of these issues manage to get into power within national governments, we could start to see some real change.
And of course, there is always the option that many people will take in real life: ignore the restrictions/laws and get away with it. I don't like this one at all personally, because it means those who work within the system are always losing out to those willing to break the rules, but there's no point denying the reality. For example, what are Tesla really going to do to someone who violates this rule? If they start routinely breaking the cars somehow then they're going to face an existential threat to their brand. If they sue the customer, there's a fair chance that they will lose after their terms are found to violate consumer protection laws in enough jurisdictions to kill their whole strategy.
The sad thing is that the final option is often "good enough" for enough people that we don't build enough momentum to push for the other better ones, so the law-abiding but better-wanting citizens lose out as usual.
I think you mean 'wallet'.
But it's hard for consumers when as individuals they have little choice.
Mobile OSs come in 2 flavours. Wherein there is lack of competition, it's nary impossible for consumers to 'vote with their wallets' because there's few other places they can go.
I think this might call for some intelligent regulation.
If you support it, why? Otherwise, your comment adds no more substance than me saying "I'm against this." and offering no further explanation.
> Traditionally, goods are subject to the first sale doctrine--once I buy a shirt, it's my property, and if I want to sell or rent it, I can. It's mine.
> But software is licensed. When I buy a piece of software, I'm actually paying for a limited and revokable right to use someone else's property. And now companies are putting software into more and more goods.
That's a pretty good summary.
"Why Sell What You Can License? Contracting Around Statutory Protection of Intellectual Property" by Elizabeth I. Winston, George Mason Law Review, Vol. 14. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=925995
> "Historically, the transfer of goods has been through sale, a model regulated by public legislation. Increasingly, however, the transfer of goods is occurring through licensing, a model regulated by private legislation. Privately-legislated licenses - for such chattels as musical and written works and agricultural goods - are being used to circumvent publicly-legislated restrictions on intellectual property."
Tesla wants their cars to be the best and most popular cars on the road. It's directly beneficial to their mission of safer and more convenient driving for everyone. our entire notion of what driving means and how it's done will change when Teslas outnumber manually-driven cars (they'll be closer to the protocols followed by planes, actually).
There's only one problem. Not everyone can afford to buy or finance a $100,000 car. Many people struggle to buy or finance a $30,000 car. But many more people can afford to lease cars at those price-points. So like every luxury car brand ever, it's in Tesla's best interest to promote leasing the car to get it in as many people's garages as possible.
This creates another problem: Teslas aren't sold at dealerships. You configure your car online, check out, sign some papers and wait for your car to be delivered. There's no central place for modified Teslas to be sold or traded-in and reconfigured back to stock. A modified Tesla compromises the safety features that make them so lucrative. This compromises things like their self-driving goals.
What do? Maybe locking down the firmware super tight and putting scary words in the purchasing/leasing agreement that discourage any curiosities regarding changing the car is a good approach. Given the stakes they're trying to pull and given just how friggin' awesome their cars are and given that I generally don't care for repairing cars anyway, I'm totally fine with never touching the internals if it means that I can have a more boss car for less money.
I think this argument applies for nearly everything, which is why SaaS products are so lucrative.
Warning: you pay for someone else's effects of work, but it's still too early to call software property.
How do we handle software ownership? If I sell you a piece of software that you now own, you can go and resell copies of that software to whoever you want. What is the best way to handle that?
Warranties on physical goods have a long history (in the US) of being void if the owner makes certain changes. Should that apply to software?
(great comment btw)
The idea that copyright law should prevent things like format shifting or making personal back-up copies of a song or movie someone already paid for is absurd to me. It's just the legal version of scope creep.
The idea that copyright law should allow people who sell software to impose arbitrary restrictions on how it may be used or whether that copy can subsequently be passed on to someone else or any other unrelated conditions for that matter, all because of technicalities about making transient copies when software is installed on a device or executed from RAM, is just the worst kind of legal sophistry.
I think there are reasonable arguments about alternative business models, particularly permanent sales vs. some sort of temporary rental arrangement. There's a danger here that for pure knowledge works we may shift towards a system where everyone has to rent everything, but I think it's too early to say that the market can't sort this one out on its own and the success of services like Netflix and Spotify suggests that other models can be useful as well.
In a some very limited cases, I think there are also valid reasons to restrict what the general public are allowed to do with software, but these are mostly regulatory issues where we already have similar concerns with physical devices, such as preventing someone who doesn't know what they're doing from bringing down a communications network by transmitting noise and effectively DoS attacking everyone else. But IMHO these cases should invariably be addressed with their own suitable laws or regulations, issued by the relevant government authorities for the common good, not by the original developers subverting the principle of copyright for their own purposes.
Otherwise, for a physical product that only includes software incidentally anyway, I just don't see any ethical basis for restricting what the customer can do with it just because of the software element, and abusing copyright law for that purpose just shows how broken copyright law has become.
This is not entirely unreasonable, they can probably justify it some way, of course it's probably just a away go guarantee their service contracts.
If your modification or repair can be shown to contribute to a problem/ accident, you're held liable, not the manufacturer.
Instead it was used, and abused by manufacturers - "Oh, your transmission blew? Horrible! It's a real shame that you put aftermarket rims on your car, those are non approved parts and void your vehicles warranty!"
Think about it: some guy changes the suspension on his car, making it super tight, puts racing wheels on - and then claims an issue on 'warranty' when something happens due to his modifications?
It's definitely within reason to forfeit a warranty if someone hacks up the product with their customizations.
There's no way an auto-manufacturer can provide warranties for parts, which depend on other parts - that have been altered.
" but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."
Tesla Network? Uber/Lyft competitor?
Plus I sure hope this won't hold up in court. I do not want a company telling me how to use my product that I paid for.
I could very easily see if you go to the same mechanic and they input your mileage between visits and a system having a reasonable chance of getting scheduled maintenance correct based upon time or average mileage.
I've never heard of a company pulling data from a car OTA to do this type of work. (some car insurance companies are a different story though)
Yet the media will probably spin this as "people just don't care," as they usually do with privacy issues. It's very much an awareness and education issue.
No, it doesn't, at least not necessarily.
I also bought a Toyota last year. They called on a regular timed schedule that had nothing to do with my actual usage pattern. We got a call to come in for our 5,000 mile service when we'd just completed the 10,000 mile service.
It may be a feature of the higher-end models, but it's definitely not something the 2015/2016 Corollas seem to do.
I bet if you were willing to waive the warranty they'd stop calling you. But, being as how the warranty on cars is now 5+ years, and that the maintenance variance among owners is high, I don't see this as a bad thing.
Granted, it's not happening to me (yet), so I might complain too.
I'm not defending Tesla here, I just want to draw an analogy. You can't go a store, buy a DVD for $15 and then charge tickets to project to an audience. You need a different, more expensive license for that. The same applies to music and software, even if it is embedded firmware in a car.
Maybe this model is actually bad because it circumvents the first sale doctrine, and we need to make this kind of restriction one illegal (haha, in my dreams).
Of course this is easy to fix, but it would still result in either forbidding commercial use (without license) or metered supercharging.
Wonder if I have the option to opt out of the "Network" and join Uber or a future entity?
Nothing more annoying than a company that starts to overstep boundaries.. Stay out of my personal decisions.
Indeed, the more restrictions Tesla adds, the more enforceable it is:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/the-end-of-used-m...
It won't sound evil. They will just tell the politicians that in order to invest huge sums of money they need guarantees, that the uncertainty of not binding their customers hinders job creation and investment, etc. Nothing is new in that playbook, since from their point of view it's actually not even wrong. It's not like they have to come up with some outrageous lies. Today it's Tesla, but that process has been going on for a long time. It's just too good: Control over a stable income stream instead of the ups and downs of the free market. It also appeals to people working in those firms, so again not actually clearly "evil".
It also appeals to a lot of people in our allegedly "uncertain and dangerous times" that there is ever more "order" and control. They actually have a point: The more complex out systems become, which includes the state, the more dangerous failure and the harder a recovery. Are our systems becoming more unstable? If so the trend explains itself, because that calls for more certainty and control - since changing the system itself seems to be no option because nobody knows how and what to change it to, or at least there is no trace of a consensus. So, more order and control it is.
(Which your linked article makes clear.)
My bet is that this is more because of legal reasons than business model reasons (though of course Tesla wants a piece of that pie)
My questions is - why would Tesla want to stop them doing that?
The goal is to transition the world to sustainable transport, ASAP. If companies are buying tens of thousands of their cars, that's great!
I have to wonder if Tesla want to stop this because they want to make the profit from the fleet, or because of legal reasons.
If you take a ride in a taxi, and you like what you see, you seem more likely to buy that car in the future.
Tesla made this software. They spent years planning, designing, and working on it. Uber have a scheduling app.
Frankly I'm all for this. Tesla is a MUCH better company than Uber. Let them take the ridesharing market and our world will be much better off.
- liability
- hacking prevention: anybody in the car will be able to take over the car, so you should make sure there's always somebody you trust in the car
- regulatory: the owner of the car is liable for any infractions a car makes, so only there should always be somebody you trust in the car
But the wording makes clear that this is just a cash grab. You'd think that Tesla would have worded it to imply that they actually have a good reason...
I'm more than willing to agree to this concept, if for example, Tesla sends me a new top of the line model 3/s/x every year for around 5k-ish/yr - At that price point, I feel that they can tell me what I can / can't do with "their" car.
However, now, they expect people to pay the full price of the car (anywhere between 31k to almost 150k) and then they get to dictate how I use the car.
Given time, this sort of concept will be applied to everything "we" own. I mean, it's just getting started...
In a few decades, you'd not really own anything - the house you live in, the devices that you use, everything will be a subscription service.
While I look at it as a bleak / weird future, I love SaaS products in general over IaaS products, because it means, I don't have to put effort into stuff. And if that means, I'd never have to fix my car, or my house for example...is that a future the general population will have an issue with?
Just to clarify, in the true meaning of the word "own", you never owned your house, and that goes to at least post WW2 times.
If you believe you own your house simply because its paid off, then try not to pay property tax imposed on you by the county you live in. But don't be surprised if one year later Sheriff shows up at your "own" house doorstep with eviction team.
You still own your house, but the government, as elected by the people, has decided that one of the ways to encourage/ enforce property tax payment is the right to use said property as collateral. You explicitly agree that you are obligated to do so, and laws, which aren't secret, divulge the possible consequences of failure to do so. This in no way diminishes ownership, any more than you parking the car that you own somewhere that it may be towed and impounded means that you somehow "never really owned it".
If you want to talk about ownership of the -land- that's a different, tangential, kettle of fish.
Call it anything but, please don't call it an ownership.
(In contrast to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_simple )
Here's why I think so:
Tesla is setting the correct expectations. Once the car is fully autonomous, the process of dispatching rides to a pickup location will be controlled by Tesla.
So, if you own the car, and but are not needing the car to be used for a week, the car becomes available on the Ridesharing Autonomous Network of Teslas (RANT :). At that point, it makes no sense to put the car on something like say Google / Uber autonomous networks of Ridesharing.
Its a bit like how iPhone is not open for non app store downloads and yet an iPhone buyer 'owns' the phone.
FWIW, every autonomous car maker will put their car on their own rideshare network (making a rider app is 1% of creating the ridesharing service effort). Uber and Lyft apps will become too expensive to use if they cannot figure out the autonomous vehicle part of the equation.
But if that's the case, then I will not pay thousands of dollars to own one.
No I won't. It's simple economics that I won't.
Assuming a future where I can choose to rent my car's free time to a ride sharing app. You just told me that I'd be able to make just as much money locked into a single customer as I would if different customers had to compete to rent my car's free time.
And yes blah blah blah I could buy a different type of car. But market forces don't break this sort of monsopoly until "what app can I rent my car's time to" is the TOP purchase differentiator to a very sizable portion of auto buyers.
Even if there would be no damages, imagine getting your car back to go somewhere with your family and it smells like a bad kind of party.
Leases are great for us that buy used since we get to have awesome cars at tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than new
Who knows what they will choose to do.
And people are saying "Yeah, sounds reasonable!" in this thread? Okay...
Right, but isn't the penalty for going against Ferrari merely that they will refuse to sell to you in the future? The deadmau5 thing was about the "purrari" stuff, not the crazy nylon wrap.
Tesla is attempting to do something far worse.
Revenue from car sales will go down as more and more people use fleet services and car companies will make the majority of revenue from autonomous ride sharing networks, why let some competitor use your cars/software without having to do any of the difficult work themselves, creating a low barrier to entry is a losing strategy if your doing all the work
Honestly how many jurisdictions will allow self driving vehicles (without a human on board) to function before the current generation of cars reach end of life?
Seems like it would be better to do it with pricing than irritating rules...
"Dear Customer - your usage patterns shows that you are using your car for ride sharing revenue. Please stop it."
"Dear Customer - Second warning."
"Dear Customer - we have disabled important safety updates for your car, because it looks like you are ride sharing for profit. You might be a real estate agent with irregular driving patterns for legitimate reasons but we cannot confirm that. Sucks to be you."
If you are a real estate agent with irregular driving patterns, there will be other patterns that are consistent. For example you (and your key fob) always being in the car. You would go from your home/office to several different addresses, then back to home/office.
Also, I'm sure that when tesla sent the warning the best action would be to explain the situation. If that fails, tweet Elon.
Even though you paid for them ...
I have a new toaster for sale. Must use my electricity, nobody else's :)
"Can afford a Tesla"
"Wants to drive for Uber"
Discussing the sustainability, they noted that after the purchase of the car, running costs were effectively free. Due to subsidies provided by the government, there is no refuelling charge, and as an electric car, it's not subject to emissions laws e.g. requirement to turn your car off if stationary for more than 2 mins, not allowed to be stationary for more than 2 minutes with air conditioning turned on.
Two of the drivers I spoke to intended to buy more Teslas for their family for this reason, one already had another one on order.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-uber-driver-picks-you-...
https://medium.com/@SteveSasman/how-i-used-abused-my-tesla-w...
"Can afford a Tesla"
"Wants to monetize Tesla when not using it"
I think there's room for profiting from driving Uber. (I also agree that it's a good bit less than it appears based on the cash-in and cash-out every week.)
