What Does Ownership Mean In the Digital Age?

It used to be that once you bought something, you owned it until you decided to sell it, give it away, throw it out - or until the implacable forces of nature rendered it inoperable.

But that was then. Now, as the following article explains, you may own the hardware, but you most emphatically do not own the software that enables it to function.

This raises questions about our notions of value, utility, acceptability as well as the laws that govern their applilcation. All of which are going to have to be redefined. JL

Alex Kidman reports in ABC News:

You don't "own" smartphone apps, just the ability to use them. Ditto for your copy of Windows, or those songs on your iTunes account. So what happens when the servers that facilitate these products are shut off?
When you buy a product, you expect to own it. But does that concept have any meaning when companies can switch it off from afar?
Imagine, if you will, the very near future in which your entirely automated home wakes you gently with pre-brewed coffee, lights up sections of the house as you walk through them, having previously warmed them to temperatures you liked based on an ongoing profile of your preferences, and opens doors as you approach based on a specific biometric profile.
Sublime most days, but then suddenly, everything stops working. Not because of the invasion of creatures from beyond the stars - I'm pretty sure that's not due until 2030 or so - but because the hardware vendor you purchased all your home automation gear from switched off a server. Suddenly, all the equipment you've spent your money on is rendered functionally useless at the flick of a switch, as if you never really owned it at all.
Feels a little unfair, doesn't it? It's already happening to some technology consumers.
Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil"? That seems like a long time ago. The latest brouhaha the search giant finds itself embroiled in involves the rapidly evolving field of what's called the "Internet of Things" - a broad term used to describe network-aware devices that can share data for a variety of purposes.
IoT is a very hot industry buzzword right now, with a lot of quite reasonable concern over security issues, but not quite as much focus on who really controls the hardware that you're going to be expected to spend your money on. Google's big investment in IoT has been in a company called Nest, but along the way it also picked up another company (Google does this a lot) called Revolv.
Revolv made smart home hubs, but Google didn't buy them for their tech. It was after their staff. Revolv recently announced it was closing down the servers that talked to the Revolv smart home products.
From May 15, Revolv gear - of which there probably isn't much in Australia, if any - will stop working. Not because the silicon will explode, but because the servers behind Revolv will be switched off. Google still hasn't announced if it'll recompense customers affected by this move in any way.
What we're seeing is a gradual change in the concept of ownership as we embed more software into the products we buy. Smart gadgets can be great, but not too many people stop to consider what the state of software licensing means for those products, and especially what this could mean for their useful lifespan.

It was always presumed that once you'd purchased hardware, its useful life was more dependent upon the gradual forces of entropy or your own desires to keep using it, rather than whether a given company supported it.

In the direct software space it's an evolution that is essentially complete. You don't "own" a copy of Windows (or Mac OS) that you can shift from one computer to another; you own a licence for a copy on a very specific hardware configuration.
You don't own your smartphone apps, or any music or video you've purchased from iTunes or Google Play, just the right to listen to or view their content. You can't pass them on to your next of kin or resell them, or even give them away. Famously (but probably apocryphally) Bruce Willis was reported as actively disliking the idea that his iTunes library won't go to his kids when he passes away.
Bought books for a Kindle? You don't own those either. Amazon even has form in the content-destroying department, remotely killing books due to licensing issues on Kindles back in 2009. To make things even more ominous, one of the titles they removed was George Orwell's 1984.
The classic definition of hardware was it was the stuff you could drop on your foot. But it was always presumed that once you'd purchased hardware its useful life was more dependent upon the gradual forces of entropy or your own desires to keep using it, rather than whether a given company supported it.
Most of us probably wouldn't even think that way when buying, say, a fridge, car or door lock. But what if they were internet fridges, self-driving cars or IoT locks? That's when you'd want to look very closely at the license agreement that comes with the device before laying your money down.
Those terms and conditions are buried in the end user license agreements (EULA) that most of us tend to blithely click through, or in the case of physical products, put to the side while setting up a fancy new gadget. The precise extent to which every EULA would pass Australian law is still something of a grey area. Really, it's not something that existing consumer law has really had to consider up until now.
I'll be particularly interested to see where Australian consumer law protections run up against an IoT product's end of life. Goods have to be fit for purpose for a "reasonable" amount of time, but there are no defined spans of what "reasonable" actually means within consumer law. A vendor switching off an IoT gadget could find themselves free and clear if it was cheap and you'd used it for years, but maybe not if they decided to exit a costly market after only six months.
For an IoT product, and that's a wide field that will only get wider over the coming years, the ownership of the server that allows it to talk to other products is arguably more vital than the ownership of the product itself. Because without network smarts, all you're going to buy is a chunk of effectively worthless silicon and plastic.