Supreme Court says you own your devices

Skanda said:

Supreme Court ruling on printer cartridges changes what it means to buy almost anything
Supreme Court overturns Lexmark’s patent win on used printer cartridges

TLDR; Yesterday they decided a case against Lexmark. Lexmark was trying the 'you only licence their product' line and the Court in a 7-1 decision said that you actually own that device. This is a pretty major decision for consoles and all sorts of tech devices. It could eventually trickle down to digital software as well though this case only dealt with hardware.

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This is indeed a great ruling for consumers. Good work by the SCOTUS.

Lendarios said:

This case clears the way also to the import of items from another country and undercut the US prices.

For example if ms sells Xbox in India at a fraction of the price, you can buy those from there and import it to the USA.

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You could always do this, grey market items are not illegal in the US unless they violate some other law (such as safety regs for gray market vehicles) but grey market items in and of themselves are not illegal.

What this prevents is companies suing the importers on patent grounds if those items were already sold in commerce overseas. If it's a grey market "new item" importer, (say, an overseas dealer) they will still face patent restrictions as I read the case. Patent exhaustion only applies once an item has been sold.

Lanx said:

So what happens when YOU(the owner) puts a modchip in your new Xbox/PS, and you use THIER network, that detects your modchip and Bricks your machine.

Whom can sue whom?

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I think there's a good question about "bricking" machines before this ruling anyway. I'm not aware of any cases on that but it seems to me if they intentionally disable your item that you paid for (modded or not) then they'd be liable for damage. If they just prevent you from connecting to their network (as per their terms) thats a different matter.

Lendarios said:

"Patent exhaustion only applies once an item has been sold." You are correct, that is why I used the example of Microsoft selling an xbox in India.

The case, at least the import part, reminded me the textbook case Kirtsaeng v. john wiley & sons, which had a similar outcome, but it was centered around copyright law.

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My point is you could always buy used Xboxes in India if you wanted to, there's nothing illegal about that.

Good luck connecting to Microsofts services in the US with it...

Lendarios said:

Before this case, if you tried to import them to the US, Microsoft could have used the Patent law to stop you from selling them here.

But, you are the expert on this field =). So I'll deffer to you.

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No, not if you imported it to the US. If you imported it to the US and *tried to sell it here.*

You could always just buy a used item and bring it here.

You should look back at your original statement.

Mist said:

Also super obvious that you own a thing that you purchased.

But yes, it should make jailbreaking just about any physical thing legal.

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Bullshit thats super obvious, software makers have been trying to sell the "we're just selling you a license to use this software you just purchased and your license is revocable based on this click-through shrink-wrap license terms that you automatically accept when you use the software" thing for a long time.

Blizzard won a contributory copyright claim against bnetd, on this premise:

Users accept the EULA, and when they break the EULA, their license to use the software is revoked. Now, they don't want to sue customers directly (not to mention it's impractical) but they sued bnetd, saying that their tool facilitates the breaking of copyright by the customers since the tool is what breaks the EULA. The copyright claim comes because when the customers load the software into RAM to use it, it makes a temporary copy. Without the license to use the software (the EULA) such copying into RAM is subject to copyright (WHAT THE FUCK) and bnetd facilitated that.

.............. WHAT THE SHIT

Patent exhaustion and copyright exhaustion ("first sale doctrine") are definitely not settled law and there's a shit ton of bullshit going on.

Mist said:

I'm talking about hardware.

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There's no explicit differentiation between software and hardware in intellectual property. Both are protected to a certain extent by either patents or copyrights or trademarks/trade dress or trade secrets....