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by mrguyorama 458 days ago
In the 90s we DID apply the same logic to game consoles. Sony, Nintendo, and Sega all lost or settled court cases that established a precedent of interoperability.

Sega's trademark rights were literally ignored as a "Fair Use" for a 3rd party to be able to release games for Sega's console, because the alternative was that it would be impossible to legally release a third party game cartridge, which the court did not like as an outcome.

But then we got the DMCA and laws and rules that make it not legal to circumvent DRM in an attempt to do the normal Fair Use things. That's the primary legal limit to running whatever you want on consoles. Companies were given the legal right to make a technical protection of their IP, and if you tried to get around those technical measures to do things that you had a legitimate and legal case to do, you would still fall afoul of the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention

Basically the DMCA completely obliterated the previous "You can't prevent a third party from touching your stuff after you sell it" that was status quo before. There's all sorts of vagaries in US copyright law about Fair Uses and "legal backups" but the DMCA destroys all of that. All you have to do is encrypt or even just xor your program/movie/whatever with a simple key and suddenly it's completely illegal to use any tool other than one provided or licensed by that company to interact with that data. It's insane.

The courts had given americans fairly strong property rights with digital property, much more closely aligning with rights for physical items and the doctrine of first sale, but the DMCA destroyed all that, because that's what IP companies wanted.