Instead of changing the name, how about making sure licensed digital "goods" receive all of the legal protections afforded other goods: warranties, first sale, the whole package.
Those concepts have a legal origin because we believed consumers actually had some rights that you shouldn't be able to simply whisk away just because you are a more powerful negotiator. Apparently we decided those basic protections, enshrined by both code and common law, are overrated for an emerging sector of the economy. It was an odd conclusion, decided in a funny way where no citizen nor Senator ever cast a vote and where the open policy discussion on this core economic issue was muted and invisible.
It's time to stop pretending nothing changed.
The solution is a completely unsexy thing: we need to revise the classification of goods in the intro to the UCC, the "Universal Commercial Code," then get states to actually adopt it. We need to completely re-examine the way goods are distinguished from services at common law so that selling a piece of software with no support agreement is a good while mowing a lawn stays a service.
This isn't the moonshot of legal theory, we should be able to handle it without completely breaking society.
The biggest hurdle might be finding some way to make the sharing of cheap or free software still viable, but this should be manageable. People are able to do favors for their neighbors like take their kids to school or shovel their driveways without facing crushing liability from service contracts. Surely we can find an out for shareware.
Or maybe I'm overly optimistic. Again, we'd have to roll up our sleeves and work this stuff out, but I don't put it out of humanity's reach to balance the freedom to share code against the right of consumers to resell digital goods.
Those concepts have a legal origin because we believed consumers actually had some rights that you shouldn't be able to simply whisk away just because you are a more powerful negotiator. Apparently we decided those basic protections, enshrined by both code and common law, are overrated for an emerging sector of the economy. It was an odd conclusion, decided in a funny way where no citizen nor Senator ever cast a vote and where the open policy discussion on this core economic issue was muted and invisible.
It's time to stop pretending nothing changed.
The solution is a completely unsexy thing: we need to revise the classification of goods in the intro to the UCC, the "Universal Commercial Code," then get states to actually adopt it. We need to completely re-examine the way goods are distinguished from services at common law so that selling a piece of software with no support agreement is a good while mowing a lawn stays a service.
This isn't the moonshot of legal theory, we should be able to handle it without completely breaking society.