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Just the other day, I got a card in the mail for my 30th birthday. When I opened it up, the card started singing "Happy Birthday." And that little thing - pealing out at the top of its automated lungs - made me laugh. What a strange thing to computerize.
But it suddenly occurred to me that this silly card was the perfect example of what I call The Law of Electronic Eventuality: If something can have a computer in it, eventually it will have a computer in it. Our physical objects aren't just physical anymore. Code runs unseen through phones, watches, smoke alarms, birthday cards, and more like connective tissue. As with muscle, it's that connective tissue that makes a thing work.
Without code, without software, our Things become inert. Dead.
While this ushers in a whole new world of possibilities, it's also redefining ownership. Because when you purchase a physical object, you don't actually buy the software in it - that code belongs to someone else. If you do something the manufacturer doesn't like - repair it, hack it, unlock it - you could lose the right to use "their" software in "your" thing. And as these lines between physical and digital blur, it pits copyright and physical ownership rights against each other.
Welcome to the brave new world of copyright. If you want to truly own what you buy, you'll have to fight for those rights - because they are disappearing.
Comment: Note that when those in high posts of government murder and pillage sovereign counties for no reason at all and are able to get away with it, it creates precedence and gives permission for such perversions to spread, especially by individuals who lack a human conscience.