While these kinds of “bricking” clauses haven’t been tested in court, lawyers who spoke to Ars felt they would probably hold up to judicial review.
This is laughable at best, would 100% never go to court. The cost of losing would destroy so many models… and defending in it in the light of real consequences is going to make them popular… Ask the RIAA how suing customers made them look.
“Although users own the hardware, the software that’s needed to run it is subject to a license agreement,” attorney Jon Loiterman told Ars. “If you violate the license terms, Nintendo has the right to revoke your access to that software. It’s less common for software makers to revoke access to software in a way that disables hardware you bought from them, but the principle is the same.”
i guess that sort of makes sense, like if you’re hacking the thing to install your own software, Nintendo says “have fun outside but you can’t come back to our garden”.
But it also doesn’t because Nintendo has the power to remove functionality that I already paid them for. Even if I tinker with my device, why does that mean that I can never go back to the stock Switch experience that I paid for?
If SIE Inc determines that you have violated this Agreement’s terms, SIE Inc may itself or may procure the taking of any action to protect its interests such as disabling access to or use of some or all System Software, disabling use of this PS5 system online or offline, termination of your access to PlayStation Network, denial of any warranty, repair or other services provided for your PS5 system, implementation of automatic or mandatory updates or devices intended to discontinue unauthorized use, or reliance on any other remedial efforts as reasonably necessary to prevent the use of modified or unpermitted use of System Software.
Although I’ve never heard of any reports of that, and I’d love to see it tested in a courtroom. Deliberately bricking someone else’s hardware because YOU believe for some reason that they’re not using it properly is on a whole other level than just disabling online accounts. It’s vindictive.
What other industry is allowed to just do this? Its robbery. If I want to buy an Xbox and mod it to hell I should be able to. At most they should be able to disconnect me from their online infrastructure. Not brick my console.
The only place I’ve seen it is if you didn’t finish paying for it (like getting a fence replaced at your house and then not paying them will get it torn down)
There’s always the option of just scrolling past if you’re sick of the coverage. I’m not on any other instances, and this hadn’t been posted on Beehaw yet. Bee Nicer.
I fucking love the thought of paying Big Corporate in ‘exposure’ 😂
Also my basic experience — nobody lost anything (Linux ISOs, obviously), because the alternative was not me buying something.
Edit: As an adult, I’ve spent more money on vinyl records in the last decade than I have buying music for the first three quarters of my life. And much of the music in the first three quarters was also on vinyl.
And then Spotify subscription fees since launch. What is that, 20 years? 😳 And now I’m trying to move to self-hosted because all of Spotify’s buying stock in weapon manufacturers and giving head to Dumbph & Friends is making me retch 🤢
I never quite got the idea of music streaming. Maybe I’m just too old (yells at cloud), but I listened to radio shows (online) to discover new music, then downloaded it. In the era of mobile data, this seems to have been a solid choice.
I struggle to hit my 5GB data limit by a large margin … adding a streaming service and then having to upgrade my plan because of it sounds like throwing money away when I spend less a month on new tracks than Spotify costs.
There’s been some weird conditioning going on over the years with younger generations that it totally makes sense to just throw a lot of money every month at things that have cheaper, easily accessible one-time solutions. Just because you can’t buy a house doesn’t mean you should rent everything else.
Hell … I was born in the '70s, and the last time I had cable was when I lived with my parents. “Let me get this straight … you want me to pay usurious prices because there’s no way to avoid ESPN being bundled in and then trump it with ads?”
As a rule, if it has ads, I won’t pay for it (I was fine with it back in print days, as they were paying my salary on the other side of the hairline). That’s what the advertisers should be doing. You’re charging the customers too much and the advertisers too little if this is the equilibrium that makes line go up while taking money that customers could have had to spend on the advertised products.
Let’s say cable prices dropped to $20 per month. I’d imagine you’d get those ads in front of far more eyeballs, so increased ad rates would actually be beneficial. But let’s not bring logic into capitalism.
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