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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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!"
" 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'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...
(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.
(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.
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"
