This is an interesting approach, and one I find quite interesting. I am disinclined to find most attacks on IP very moving, since I know too many people who mostly seem profoundly offended that they can’t be free riders on the creative and technical efforts of others.

This approach focuses on ownership rights though, and more of what I consider “copy trolling” and otherwise engaging in a government enforced captured “razor business” with eg. Kcups, which doesn’t seem to outright forbid the inventor of the kcup system from continuing to sell the machines?

Toning down the aggression yet another notch… 

The big thing I want to establish is that you can rent stuff, or you can sell it, but you can’t fake-sell it. More realistically, I propose a “hardware ownership act”  and heavy encouragement  of an abandonment license. 

(I have no idea whether this has the slightest chance of being constitutional. Doubt it.)

The abandonment license law would: 

- Make “dead” intellectual property that is not being used pass into the public domain. 

- Make patent trolling illegal (since it revolves around not using the IP)

- Require various documentation (not neccessarily full source, but definitely API documentation and permissions) to be released when manufacturer support (such as cloud servers or the sale of consumables) ends. 

The hardware ownership law would establish that if a piece of tangible hardware is sold to somebody for a lump sum without personally negotiated contracts, and the buyer is not required to relinquish it under any ordinary circumstances, then that piece of hardware is the alloidal property of the buyer. They have a fairly broad degree of rights to hack it, destroy it, reverse-engineer it, or use it in ways other than intended by the seller and the worst that the seller can do is to have the warranty and tech support department tell them to kindly shove it. They also have the right to be furnished with various documentation and not to have their hardware keep secrets from them (beyond very narrowly-drawn “root certificate” type stuff.)

Keurig can still sell coffemakers and K-cups. They can release new versions of coffeemakers with new types of K-cups and they will have a K-cup monopoly until knockoffs can catch up. They can void warranty for anybody who uses third party K-cups. 

But they can’t keep the interface totally secret and they especially can’t use licensing, IP law, or other methods to prevent people from making knock-off K-cups. 

They also can’t choke off third-party replacement parts as long as said parts are accurately labelled. 

The thing that specifically got me angry was Samsung bricking all of a specific model of phone. There was  reason behind this (the phone is a recalled product due to risk of exploding) but this is still to me a spectacular violation of the folk contract of selling durable goods, whatever the unnegotiated license terms state. 

Other things this is meant to target: 

- Modding or jailbreaking of all kinds. Google’s Nexus phones present a good example of how you can act liberally w/r/t this but still get many of the security benefits of a locked down system (basically, you can choose between “root access” and “locked-down, certified Google system” and change between them, but some features that rely on Google’s cloud infrastructure or auto-updates only work when locked/certified). 

- Microsoft going after people who tried to make a hacker’s driver for the Kinect (before they realized that they could make money on this)

- Modding/jailbreaking Playstations and the older Xboxes

- Hacking, decompilation, and the like of hardware drivers for various devices. 

- DRM on consumables and wear items for operating durable equipment (ink cartridges, 3D printer cartridges, K-cups, etc)