I donāt think so because related services are provided externally to the device the customer owns. Just because I own a cell phone doesnāt mean I must always be provided service. Just look at the wasteland of IoT devices that basically became bricks because the services behind them were shut downā¦ this would not be the case if there were laws in place against this. It seems to me the entire point of publishing a T&C policy is to set expectations and a framework for defining exactly where your customer owned devices and āprovided servicesā are demarcated.
What is much more questionable are practices like service providers going in to a device to actively removing functionality from a customer owned device vs simply cutting off service. Examples might be certain printer models, e-reader devices, etc.
I donāt think the law is very clear here and case law has not yet established a singular strong precedent for situations like these.
Amal is right with regards to this. Still, having companies release documentation for developing new firmware for abandoned devices would be nice but thatās often protected under NDAs soā¦
There likely are laws like this. I can see maybe the EU enacting some consumer protection stuff which requires providers guaranteeing services for a period.
The issue is enforceability. Letās assume some small civil unrest nation with no military and no economic power enacts a protection law (clearly because the warlord wants to access 5G), how is that going to be enforced?
If the company providing the service has no assets in country to be seized for exampleā¦
when i was into DDWRT (i think its the same now right? or is that Tomato< ive been out of that space for a while) it was one of three big ones, Linksys, TP-Link, and Trendnet (Buffalo was huge but ended up going away i think). all 3 were pretty inexpensive so i was able to find them used pretty easily.
You own the hardware, but not the software.
By using the software you agree to allow the owner to said software to do what they want.
You can not extract a firmware and share it online, nor use it in any commercial capacity because you do not own it. The only legal way to extract a firmware and share some sections is if you are doing it under the umbrella of security research.
I completely understand their argument, but itās still a questionable practice in my opinion. I mean, what if I was like hey, you own your implant but the software in it is mine and I decided to broadcast a signal from my mystery drones flying over various US cities to communicate with the hardware you own in order to deactivate my software inside your hardware.
Technically legally sound but still questionable because at the end of the day you purchased a thing that does a thing regardless of any external services I may or may not provideā¦ and yet I can still be like ānopeā and make that thing you purchased stop working or work in a different way which was not what you purchased. Imagine a shovel not digging anymore because I decided the attachment software keeping the head affixed to the handle wasnāt worth maintaining and so I just decided to deactivate all shovels.
