[brookst]

Yeah I’m so tired of rhetorical games people play. It’s a shitty business practice, it is deceptive and possibly false advertising, it may be violation of a contract and / consumer production laws, but removal of a software feature is not “theft”.

And many of these same people probably (and rightfully) laughed at music and movie people casting piracy as “theft”.

[basilikum]

When you sell something and then after the sell you take away the very thing you sold — that you no longer own — from the person who now owns it, that is called theft. You are taking something away from someone that they own. Piracy is not theft because you do not take anything away from anyone, you copy it and do not pay for it, but the original is still there. No one lost anything.

It is irrelevant whether the thing or feature you took away is implemented in hardware or software. Notably it is often hardware functionality but the thief uses software to restrict it.

You could perhaps argue that another property crime might better describe it such as criminal mischief or in some cases fraud. But in any case it is a crime against someone else's property.

[cherioo]

Does it not depend on what the feature is?

Is it theft if a company stops supporting TLS 1.0 clients that were previously supported?

What about upgrading service to only support a new form of authentication, breaking some clients?

What if the new authentication can only be done by locked down official client?

What if the company never advertised support through third party clients?

[brookst]

Wait so if a third party took away a feature you use, would that be “theft”? Like if your ISP is down when you want to watch a movie?

It’s wrong for sure, but I’m vicariously embarrassed for those who want to define everything they don’t like as “terrorism” or “theft” or whatever, strictly because it sounds so dramatic and casts the wrongdoers as not just wrong, but evil.

It’s old, it’s tired, it doesn’t convince anyone.

Simple “failure to adhere to terms of sale” is sufficient, and doesn’t have the baggage of being false.