A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Marshall Van Alstyne <marshall AT MIT.EDU>]

Whoa, here's a guy who bought a system capable of recording to one format 
only to have the rights to do so revoked at a later point!

There are probably at least two different kinds of recourse.

1) If the hardware product was advertised as having a specific 
functionality only to have that functionality revoked later, this is 
potentially actionable under contract law.  I'd want to read the fine print 
but an argument can certainly be made that he paid for one product then got 
another.  I suspect, however, that it's a larger problem of monopoly 
content where the provider, in this case HBO not the HW recording box, 
reserves the right to change formats -- a nasty problem of bad behavior on 
the part of monopolists!.

2) In a broader sense, there is a great market style solution used by the 
GPL. One of the cleverest clauses, IMHO, is Clause 9 that gives users the 
right to use the existing contract or any future contract on their 
code.  This prevents rights from being withdrawn.

This does highlight an interesting subtlety.  New *content* can later be 
released under a *new* license so that existing rights in the stock of 
prior content and the tools to run them don't apply.

So, we might want to consider licenses that apply a clause 9 to future 
content as well as the tools themselves. This might say something to the 
effect that users would have the right to play new content on existing 
applications.  At the same time, it probably shouldn't obligate providers 
to provide every backward compatible format (this could retard development 
of better formats).  Rather, it would simply allow users to do this on 
their own if they wished, specifically eliminating lots of the problems 
with the DMCA.

MVA

At 07:22 AM 10/25/2004, Rob Myers wrote:
> "What purchase-decision can he make or avoid in order to signal to the 
> market that this kind of restrictiveness is unduly harsh and he won't pay 
> for it any longer?"
>
> http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/24/why_marketforces_can.html
>
> - Rob.
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