The New Servitudes: MobBlog at UofC Law
An interesting discussion of the relation between traditional servitudes (e.g. land use restrictions on purchasers of property) and software licenses, aka the ‘new servitudes.’ The first post can be found here. I won’t comment on most of the posts. Randy Picker makes a curious claim:
Consumers as a group can be better off if we make possible this sort of locked systems competition. Absent the lock, manufacturers will be forced to seek to recover all of their system development costs in the price of the printer and that can inefficiently discourage purchases of the printer. Better to recover more of those costs from heavy users and we can do that if we charge above marginal cost for the toner cartridge. But to do that, the cartridge needs to be locked to the printer. (I set this out in greater detail in my paper Copyright and the DMCA: Market Locks and Technological Contracts (preprint version here)).
The reason that may be is not obvious to me. I’ll put this paper on my to read stack, and hopefully will have time to say more about the claim at a later point.
February 6th, 2008 at 15:41 -0600
I think that it is right–unsurprisingly or I wouldn’t have said it–but you do need to see the full reasoning and the Market Locks paper lays that out; if you think that the analysis doesn’t stand up, do let me know.
April 29th, 2008 at 12:16 -0500
[...] that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the [...]