Monthly Archive for October, 2007

iEye by h.andras_xms

There is a lot of bad press going around about Apple’s iPhone at the moment. Peo­ple are upset for a cou­ple of reasons.

Crit­i­cism was ini­tially sparked a few weeks ago when the com­pany dropped the iPhone’s price by $200. While alien­ated early adopters where appeased with a refund, the resent­ment har­bored by oth­ers con­tin­ued. As a result, one group is now suing Apple for “price dis­crim­i­na­tion, under­selling, dis­crim­i­na­tion in rebates, decep­tive actions, and other wrong­do­ings”.

On another front, Apple has resently released a soft­ware update for the iPhone which effec­tively bricks those devices which have been hacked to allow extra options. Many peo­ple are not happy about Apple’s dis­re­gard for the rights of the con­sumer. Some review­ers who orig­i­nally love the iPhone are now going so far as to inform their read­ers to avoid buy­ing the iPhone. Dig­i­tal Copy­right Canada has a good anal­ogy of why these iPhone own­ers are so upset.

Here is the sce­nario. A home builder builds homes and puts their own locks on the door. They retain the keys, and do not give the keys to the new own­ers when the homes are sold. The builder, not the owner, then decides who can have keys and who can not — and the owner is not given a key.

Iama Liar, chief exec­u­tive of the home builders asso­ci­a­tion, has said the asso­ci­a­tion wanted to main­tain con­trol over the homes to pro­tect neigh­bour­hoods and to make sure the home was not damaged.

Some own­ers decide to pro­tect their own prop­erty rights and remove the lock added by the builder. In response, the builder does a few things depend­ing on the num­ber of mod­i­fi­ca­tion made: in some cases it sim­ply puts their own locks back on, in other cases is removes any­thing from the home that were added by the owner, and in other cases they burn the home to the ground.

Sounds ridicu­lous right?

While this sce­nario may seem far fetched, is is anal­o­gous to what Apple is cur­rently doing with iPhones. (See: Altered iPhones freeze up, Apple Users Talk­ing Class-Action Law­suit Over iPhone Lock­ing, Steve Jobs Girds for the Long iPhone War )

Apple sells the iPhone to cus­tomers in a way that they are locked down from being mod­i­fied by their new own­ers. Some own­ers have exerted their basic prop­erty rights and unlocked these phones. Once their prop­erty has had the for­eign lock removed, they can then choose what­ever phone net­work they want (Includ­ing buy­ing one and using it with a Rogers or Fido account in Canada), and to install and run soft­ware of their own choosing.

Apple is now dis­trib­ut­ing updated soft­ware through iTunes which will un-do these changes made by the own­ers. In some cases it sim­ply re-locks the phone and removes any non-Apple soft­ware added by the owner. In some cases it will “Brick” the phone, mak­ing the phone entirely inoperable.

Any­one who has the most remote respect for tan­gi­ble prop­erty rights should be up at arms about this. If Cana­dian law does not already make this prac­tise ille­gal, the provin­cial and fed­eral gov­ern­ments should come together to ensure that it becomes ille­gal. It is impor­tant that fed­eral par­lia­men­tar­i­ans under­stand this issue given there has been inter­est to legally pro­tect these dig­i­tal locks applied to devices by other than their own­ers, giv­ing a legal free ride for device man­u­fac­tur­ers and oth­ers who cir­cum­vent the most basic of prop­erty rights for own­ers of IT devices.

Quote by Rus­sell McOr­mond at Dig­i­tal Copy­right Canada

Other com­pa­nies are cur­rently attempt­ing to ben­e­fit from this dis­con­tent by run­ning mar­ket­ing cam­paigns high­light­ing their “open” and “free” phone polices. It’s incred­i­ble that a com­pany such as Apple, with all is hype and rabid cult fol­low­ing, would decide to take actions against con­sumers this way. Per­haps they assume that this kind of press won’t hurt them after the ini­tial back­lash. Maybe they are right.

Update: Apple’s new firmware has been hacked again.