Have any of you actual read the text of the ‘Terms of Agreement’ for any software sold in the last 20 years in the USA?
If so, you will find that you don’t really “own” what you bought.
You kind of have “rented” it for an extended period of time.
It is rather amusing.
In the sense of amusing meaning appalling.
You have paid money for a DVD/CD that contains content.
Upon installing this, you see this freaking wall of text with a clickbox at the bottom that says (I agree).
If you DON’T agree, you don’t get what you paid for.
How many of us read the wall of text?
Really?
You did?
Wow, you are in the <1% of consumers who did. (no cite… think it close… check me if you want)
The lawyers who crafted this game are really good.
So, this is why this kind of stuff is happening.
You get millions of people ‘signing’ an agreement and it carries weight in a court of law.
The fact that the ‘signing’ was coerced means nothing if not challenged.
And it isn’t.
Certainly. However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Sony banning people for hacking their systems. It’s a quid pro quo: you don’t hack the machine, we’ll let you use this network.
[QUOTE=Randy Seltzer]
People who own shares in the Green Bay Packers would disagree with you.
[/QUOTE]
Hardly. The Packers are very clear upfront about the conditions associated with ownership of Packers stock. In any event, that’s hardly analogous to ownership of a PS3, since a PS3 is not common stock.
There’s certainly a problem with shinkwrap contracts generally.
The problem is that as far as I can tell, they dictated that rule a posteriori (or to put it the right way around, they proclaimed those were the new rules, then banned people retroactively over breaking it).
Precious few contracts allow for one party to do that sort of thing. Only software end-user licenses grant such disproportionate privileges to whosoever came up with the Just Click Yes Legalese Brick ™.
I’d rather it not be so, but I feel that is their prerogative. I only object if they needlessly require network connection for the game to function in single player, and then brick the game even if your play does not affect others. Not sure if they’ve done that. I recall some PC games requiring a constant connection.
Yes, you should be able to do all of those things. If I don’t spend or sell the fake money, it should be fine. (I’ve never seen a parent that photocopies money to have play money for kids get in trouble.) And if I don’t use or sell the meth, it should be fine, even though I believe it currently isn’t.
But let’s say these were things that hurt other people and thus were worthy of being illegal. Jailbreaking doesn’t hurt people. It merely takes control away from the company who sold you the item. It is very clearly the actions AFTER jailbreaking that are often committed that often hurt people.
And let’s not forget that jailbreaking is currently not illegal. Apple’s EULA doesn’t make jailbreaking an iPhone illegal, so I can’t see how Sony’s EULA can. It’s just something Sony doesn’t like. And they should treat the actual problem instead of what they don’t like.
Doing what they do makes them jerks, and thus it is no longer a moral issue on whether or not I violate their terms. Throw in that they added a clause that says you can’t join a class action suit against them (which oddly works), and I actually find it hard to argue that I shouldn’t just hack the thing out of principle.
Of course, doing so would require me giving them money, which I don’t do. I’ll just do what I always do, stay a generation or two behind and use emulators, and maybe the odd PC game if I want to play multiplayer (which I almost never do. I have yet to see a multiplayer game that has what I like about single player games.)
[referring to “legitimate limitations on ownership and property rights”]
I’m sorry but you are mistaken, at least under U.S. law. There is a large field of jurisprudence dedicated to the ability of one private party to govern the personal use of another private party’s property. Off the top of my head, restrictive covenants are a good example. Waste is another. These generally deal with real property but have been found to apply to personal property in some circumstances. Probably the more applicable area of law here is basic contract law, which is a very simple and very common way for one party to control something that is fully owned by another party.
Saying “it’s my property so I can do whatever I want with it” is a great talking point, and clearly a lot of people really enjoy repeating it. But as I’ve said a couple times before – it’s simply not that black and white.
FYI - the mere possession of counterfeit currency is a federal crime in the U.S., and is in fact a strict liability crime. I.e. you don’t even have to know you have it. Possession of meth is also a crime in every state I know, though I doubt it’s a strict liability crime in most.
And my point (or at least part of my point) with that post was that there is almost no legitimate reason to have counterfeit currency or meth in your possession in the first place. (Okay, yeah, I’m sure you could come up with some wacky fringe case where it’s fine, but the overwhelming majority of cases will have nefarious purposes.) And since there’s no legitimate reason to counterfeit currency or make meth, it seems like it should be fine to punish those who do. If the feds bust a guy with counterfeiting equipment and fake bills in his basement, he should not be able to get off scott free by claiming “I wasn’t going to spend it! I was going to give it to my kids to play with!”
Your argument about jailbreaking not hurting people seems akin to the gun arguments. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. So let’s not regulate guns; let’s only punish people after the fact for misusing them.
Also, I think it’s important to distinguish between “illegal” and “violates a contract or somebody’s rights.” Jailbreaking a particular device may not be a crime, but it might violate a contract. Which could have much worse consequences: the consequence of a crime could be a $100 fine whereas the consequence of a breached contract could be $100 million in liquidated damages.
Absolutely you should be able to hack/disassemble/modify/etc. any piece of equipment you purchase that you did not explicitly state that you wouldn’t. Randy Seltzer: you seem to be arguing that entire categories of actions should be illegal because some subset can then be turned around and used as an aid to commit a crime. That is an extreme, and I think trivially weak position.
That’s not really what I’m arguing, but it would not be an extreme (or trivially weak) position. I’ve already given several real-world commonly accepted examples in this thread. E.g. Possession of counterfeit currency. Possession of illegal drugs. Possession of certain weapons. These are all illegal not because they are evil per se, but because they can be put to evil ends.
But again, that’s not my central argument. My central argument is that easy answers like “you can always do what you want with your own stuff” do not always fit.
I don’t have a solution to the conundrum at hand, but I will be sure to come up with one before I run for office.
You are equating “possessing counterfeit money” with having a hacked PS3? That is an even weaker position.
I was reading your argument that allowing a hacked PS3, like allowing a printing press (which, of course, is legal) could lead to some other crime therefore we should make the press/hacked PS3 illegal.
There are innumerable essays out there on the subject, but the bottom line is this: network games should not rely on the client hardware to maintain security. Now, if the guy is hosting the game you’re SOL no matter what you do, because even on a non-hacked system I imagine there are ways to run your own game code–that was possible on the PS2, for example.