[Hondor]

If you bought a car that turned out to be stolen, you might wake up one day to find it's gone because the police recovered it for the owner. It's similar here - buyers looking for a bargain that might be illegal are part of the problem of IP theft. They can seek recourse through the seller they got it from, and if that doesn't work, they shouldn't have trusted a dodgy overseas black market seller with their money.

[vacri]

However, you're talking about an independent third party with authority doing this - the police. About theft of a physical object.

Why should a vendor be able to stop you from using a thing you bought because it looks like one of theirs? No support, sure. Disavow the item, sure. Post warnings on the device as an inbuilt part of the system, sure. But destroy your item? No.

If someone is fraudulently selling cars badged as Fords, Ford itself should not be able to repossess those vehicles. And if Ford thinks that you have stolen their car, they themselves should still not be the ones who repossess it - that's what the police are for. Vigilantism is a bad thing and has all kinds of unexpected failure modes.

[Hondor]

Stealing back your car can certainly cause problems if done privately by the owner. But here it's the product itself that already came with a bricking mechanism built in and activated it itself. The buyer trusted the seller not to provide a self-bricking phone, and got ripped off. It's never going to affect an innocent phone. It's also no physical items being taken or damaged. No baby is going to be trapped in it, etc.

Actually, there's a very analogous thing for cars - LoJack. Is that wrong too?

It happens with copy protection on software. I've heard of games that become impossible to win if they detect they're pirated. Others that just fail entirely. Is that not OK either?

[chipperyman573]

>It happens with copy protection on software. I've heard of games that become impossible to win if they detect they're pirated. Others that just fail entirely. Is that not OK either?

It wouldn't be OK if the developers intentionally affected copies that most users would explicitly believe were not counterfeit (for example, if all Steam copies did this because the game developer had an exclusive agreement with EA/Origin).

The users of the counterfeit phones had no way of knowing they were counterfeit. They were advertised as brand new and came in a shrinkwrapped box.

[EdHominem]

The users of the counterfeit phones had no way of knowing the phone was fake and probably contained physical and software backdoors.

Crypto devices should brick themselves if they discover they've been tampered with.

It's a clear case of seller fraud and if you use a good marketplace (ie not the one starting with E) you can get a refund through the platform. And maybe get information to use in suing the seller.

[vacri]

> It's also no physical items being taken or damaged

So if I scramble the firmware on your phone and brick it, you don't consider that damaged?

> LoJack

... works in tandem with police, hardly 'very analagous'.

> It happens with copy protection on software.

The user should have been warned that applying the update would brick the detected non-original phone. It shouldn't have just silently fucked the user over. It's bad ethics and also bad PR. Fucking over a user acting in good faith is poor form ethically.

[icebraining]

The analogy would work if IP "theft" was anything like actual theft, ie, if the company actually lost anything that could be recovered by "repossessing" the software.

A closer analogy - and still not exactly, since the owner would still have actually lost the car - would be if the police came and burned it down just so that you couldn't use it.

[Hondor]

They company surely did lose something. Customers who wanted to buy their product ended up buying an illegal competitor's product instead. There might even be some customers who go back and buy a genuine phone now that they can't use their fake one.

They're enforcing their copyright. Why not? The police can also confiscate computers with pirated software on them. They even do that sometimes. It doesn't return the money to the IP owners but it's still a way to deter theft.

It sounds like a good idea to me. Even if it doesn't recover their lost sales, it should prevent future black market copies since customers will know to avoid unofficial sellers.

[chipperyman573]

You can't assume that someone who bought a $200 phone would buy the exact same phone for $300 if the $200 option was unavailable (I don't know the exact prices but the Ars article said that there were price differences of up to $100).

[chipperyman573]

Going even further, the analogy is still a little bit flawed, because the people buying the phones have reason to believe the phone was NOT stolen (it came brand new, sealed in a box).

It'd be like if you bought a brand new car from a dealership, then two weeks later the police came to your house, told you it was stolen and burnt it down.