[Infowarrior] - Rage against the monopolized machine: you should use products how you want

[Richard Forno]

Rage against the monopolized machine: you should use products how you want

Phones we can’t unlock. Shows we can’t skip. And now coffee machines that won’t work with a competitor’s coffee? Don’t buy in

		• Dan Gillmor
		• theguardian.com, Thursday 6 March 2014 15.29 EST

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/06/green-mountain-coffee-maker-competition
	
What does a popular coffee machine have in common with a DVR? You can buy one, but the manufacturer reserves the right to dictate how you use it.

We’ve known for years that software is an infinitely malleable commodity. Code is a set of instructions, and they can be changed. Code evolves. Features appear, improve and disappear. This is especially true of online services, with providers modifying their offerings at will.

As more and more physical goods contain more and more microprocessors and software, the boundaries we once took for granted have blurred. This is why a Keurig coffee machine from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, a single-cup brewer, will soon refuse to work with a competitor’s coffee. It’s why Dish Network will tell customers of its ad-skipping DVR that they may no longer use that feature when watching programming from Disney.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s getting worse. Hollywood has led the way, as it tries to lock down every bit of information to which it holds copyrights, even as it persuades Congress to continually extend copyright terms. Mobile phone makers continue to abuse copyright law by locking down devices to prevent customers from having more choices. Printer companies have tried to lock out third-party inkjet cartridges. Apple has engineered its mobile devices to work, in most cases, only with peripheral gear that Apple allows and, of course, that generates royalty income for the biggest technology company in the world. And so on.

I’m less bothered by Green Mountain’s move, ill-advised as it is, than some others in this genre. After all, no one is forced to buy one of the company’s latest coffee-makers, which produce a single cup at a time. Even if this was the only single-cup maker – it’s not – there are many other (and in my opinion better) ways to brew a cup of tasty java, even if they’re slightly less convenient. And it’s not as if Green Mountain was forcing owners of existing machines into this regime. I do hope, when those brewers stop working, that their owners will make the smart choice and look elsewhere for their next one.

Dish Network, on the other hand, is modifying DVRs with the company’s “Auto Hop” feature, which, if the user requests, automatically bypass the relentless barrage of advertisements in programming from the top four networks. Needless to say, the networks absolutely loathe this feature and, you guessed it, have sued Dish in an attempt to forestall the future. One reason I’ve been a Dish customer for more than 15 years has been its willingness to take on the Copyright Cartel. I still use an older DVR that includes a feature the programmers hated just as much (but had no plausible legal case against) when it was introduced, a button that makes 30 seconds disappear; it’s by far the feature I use the most.

With Auto Hop, Dish was resolute on behalf of its customers – until Disney, owner of ABC, ESPN and other programming, offered to give Dish expanded rights, including streaming, to a variety of content. At that point, Dish sold out the people who’d bought DVRs supporting Auto Hop, by agreeing to remove one of the reasons they’d bought those devices in the first place. Auto Hop won’t totally disappear for Disney programming, according to the companies’ announcement; it just won’t work for three days after the original broadcast (it works now the day after the broadcast). Yet there’s nothing preventing Dish from disabling it completely when and if Disney and other network owners offer a sufficiently rich deal. Customers were never asked if the new ways to watch Disney programs were a fair trade-off for semi-losing the Auto Hop feature. They were simply told.

Again, such corporate high-handedness, while not new – remember, Amazon removed the book, oh the irony, 1984, from customers’ Kindle ebook readers – has been relatively rare. But when software becomes part of almost everything we touch, a process that is accelerating, we can’t look at such cases as outliers and hope that most manufacturers will do the right thing. Just as the police and security agencies are racing deploy all new technologies to spy on everyone – whether the law permits it or not – private industry is racing to retain as much control as possible over the products and services it sells, and thereby control over us. The digital-rights management clampdown is a natural economic impulse, however bad for customers. But we have to say no, individually and collectively.

Saying no starts with shopping more wisely. I’ll never buy a Keurig coffee maker, period. And Dish’s deal with Disney has almost certainly hastened the day when we go without its service entirely.

But we can’t rely entirely on the market in this kind of one-size-fits-one future, in part because so many industries are trending toward monopolies or cozy oligopolies. The law needs to catch up, too.

In one arena, it has. After Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly enacted a “Right to Repair” ballot measure requiring car manufacturers to make diagnostic data available to third-party repairers, the precedent created a push for a nationwide deal among various parties. Common sense prevailed only after the law changed, but that happened because relatively deep-pocketed third-party repairers forced the issue.

How do we regain control in the meantime? It’s software, remember. So we turn to the hackers. I’ve modified my Samsung mobile phone – removing unwanted features and blocking certain kinds of data collection by app developers – by using tools provided by people who believe customers should have the right to use devices the way they choose, not solely the way the manufacturer insists. But some tools in this genre are flatly illegal, because “intellectual property” interests have persuaded Congress to codify control instead of freedom. If Congress still worked for the people instead of a variety of deep-pocketed special interests, it would require manufacturers to make their devices more open to modification.

We’re still in the early days of this war – and make no mistake, that’s what we face. The interests that want control over our lives and pocketbooks are wealthy and powerful. People are waking up to the threat. Now we all need to fight back.


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.