-
Announcement
-
Simtropolis Returns! 05/26/2026
See here for details about our site recovery efforts.
-
Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'right to tinker'.
Found 1 result
-
In what could become a landmark case, the US Federal Supreme Court ruled that patent-holders have no rights to regulate the use of their patented products, and that remanufacturers can manipulate and resell those patented products legally, opening the door to the so-called right to tinker. Consumer groups consider that this case is relevant in times when increasingly more products are offered as licenced services, defending the consumer rights to resell, manipulate, operate, modify or even destroy their property without copyright constraints by the patent-holders. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. extends on the implicancies of the judicial resolution by exposing an analogy with an used-car shop: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which presented an amicus curiae brief to the FSC, arguments that this ruling enables consumers to demand a series of radical changes on the market of complementary supplies --the so-called 'razor and blades' business model, which they extend to other technologies, as IoT devices that currently need a subscription to work, or cheap game consoles that only are useable with expensive games. On a further extension, this proposed right to tinker would be appliable to the compiled code of copyrighted software, as the sold copies of software applications are the legal private property of their buyers, a condition that would expire the intellectual propietary monopolic rights given to them by the copyright, in the same way the private property of a toner cartrigde expires the patentee monopolic rights given to them by the patent. This eventual consequence would be crucial for the modding communities of diverse proprietary softwares, as they would be legally entitled to modify and even redistribute the modified compiled code without the express authorisation of the original creators. In any case, the current ruling doesn't extends so far, just giving some vague jusrisprudencial basis for further cases to be held in behalf of modding rights, for which this new interpretation shouldn't be taken as a legal one.- 6 Replies
-
- 7
-
-
- right to tinker
- supreme court
- (and 3 more)
