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by palata 384 days ago
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the attention. "Kick him in the dongle."

> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
2 comments
like_any_other 384 days ago
> making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services

It's amazing that merely learning about how items that we own work (so-called "reverse-engineering") and exercising control over them (jailbreaking - this time the term is apt) has been made illegal. A heinous overreach by corporations into the lives of people that own their products, and a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough, they want to treat as trade secrets products with mass-market availability.

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zoobab 384 days ago
"a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough"

Expanding patents to software, in Europe they replaced the 2005 software patent directive by the Unified Patent Court, which will ignore the exclusion of 'computer programs', like the EPO did, with no way for the question to be escalated to the CJEU:

https://ffii.org/unified-patent-court-has-an-eu-treaty-legal...

Multinational corporations also became part time judges, because rubberstamping software patents is easier when you can also corrupt the judicial system:

https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k...

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krzyk 384 days ago
> making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services

Is anywhere in EU reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, and modifying any products illegal?

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Mindwipe 384 days ago
Every country has an anti-circumvention law in the EU. It is a condition of membership.

Not that that makes Doctorow's argument any better or make any more sense.

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krzyk 381 days ago
(all below - IANAL)

Strange, my country (Poland) has a law that allows reverse engineering to allow given software to work on given hardware. If (and only if) consumer has bought given software.

So e.g. I could reverse engineer MS Word to make it work on Linux and that is within my legal right, any EULA prohibiting that is void.

Same probably applies for jailbreaking - all withing legal right of customer.

I think there is something in EU law also about that, considering SAS Institute Inc. versus World Programming Ltd.

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