OK but that's a very different story, one is stolen and at the request of the owner, the other is for some ethereal vague hard to pin down rule that was broken with no way to resolve it. My use of my property that I own should not be contingent on some behavioral rule on some website that could change at any time. Don't give money to companies that can remotely brick your property without your explicit request.
Repossessing stuff is not an uncommon legal situation. Having a rented TV set in your home means little. The cops show up, and you hand it over or go to jail.
I would add that the target shouldn't be liable for disabling, losing, or accidentally breaking said device if it is detected. I think basically they have to view it as giving it to me if they stick it on my property. I want the right to take it apart and figure out how it works.
If the time in which the stereo was "forgotten" was at the time the exclusions were written into the sales contract (or the sales ad), the stereo would be legally conveyed to the purchaser of the car once the buyer and seller complete the sale.
Similarly, once a real estate purchase is completed, all items within the bounds of the property purchased--whether it be roof shingles, trees, or former owner family heirlooms they forgot to take with them--legally become possessions of the new owner unless itemized in a sales contract along with agreed-to stipulations that permit retrieval of the items by the former owner after completion of the sale.
Goodwill (and being a reasonable buyer/seller) goes a long way in situations such as these, and in most situations a buyer and seller will work out property sorting issues amongst themselves. However, there would be nothing legally preventing a buyer that stumbles upon a stash of gold bars left in the basement of their new-to-them house--that they did not know about, and that the previous owner did not disclose--and immediately selling them. [1]
BMW's recent second attempt at "enabling equipment features as a service" is a canary in the coal mine, or trial balloon, so to speak. BMW's argument for heated-seats-as-a-service is, flippantly, "What if the second buyer of the vehicle doesn't want heated seats? They don't have to pay for the service. Problem solved." This distorted-reality C-suite speak so drenched in logic fallacy is worthy of a conversation by itself, but I bring it up to say this: instead of buying a car in the traditional sense, OEMs are attempting to change the model to buying "the physical components comprising a car, and the option to enable features of those physical components".
I want no part of it. I like to use hyperbolic (at least for today) examples adapting commplace business models for smart home devices, software licenses, hardware compatibility lists, EVs, cloud services, etc. to traditional / legacy / analog items:
- What if you went to use your hammer you've owned for years, only to find out that it can't be used to drive in a nail because the company that made the hammer is no longer in business?
- What if your basement flooded because, while the trench drain around your foundation is physically capable of directing enough water away from your foundation into your sump pump, you didn't opt to pay for the "catastrophic flooding capability" license? Better yet, let's say you paid for the license, but haven't checked your email in a few days (maybe because of the storms, since your power has been out and you don't have ready Internet access) to learn that the credit card the trench-drain-as-a-service company has on file has expired and the license renewal charge was declined, so the license you leased was deactivated via OTA update without notice sent via the post?
- What if you find out while driving that your car brakes won't work because a repair shop you've gone to for years installed a set of third-party brake pads that used to be but are no longer compatible with your car (or part of an OEM-certified or OEM-supported configuration) as the result of a recent firmware update to your car's PCM/ECU?
All of those sound terrifying to me.
[1] Source: myself, but not about gold bars, unfortunately. More than one year post-purchase of a house I purchased, the seller decided they wanted a lamp back that they thought they left at the house prior to its sale. I did not remember if they left it or not, but they did leave several items behind. I sent items to their forwarding address that I deemed to be personal items (e.g. monogrammed clothes), but assumed that all other items were left because they didn't want to take them. I donated all of the items I didn't want, possibly including the lamp they desperately wanted returned, to charities. After spending a good bit of energy harassing me over the lamp, the seller consulted with counsel and learned that they had no options for recourse. The harassment stopped, and I have not heard from them since.
I think the surprise or even incredulity people over here in the EU have is not to do with "You don't pay for your stuff, we take the stuff back" (I think we're all familiar with the concept of paying for things), it's to do with how the seller remotely took actions on the item.
It's a bit like not keeping up your mortgage repayments, and the bank remotely locking you out (or in?) your house — except it's a bit worse, because the mortgage provider wouldn't have to use GPS to track where you and your house are. Perhaps that's not a shocking idea in the USA, but I think it is in the EU. I'm not for or against, just explaining where the shock factor is coming from here.
Now for my own opinion: The header here shouldn't be "Make sure you keep up your repayments", it should be "Don't buy stupid shit you don't need, can't afford, and is controlled by someone else".
That’s criminal trespass. Accessing something not yours, when the owner has some expectation of you not accessing it, even if easy to do, is often illegal.
Owners not locking goods down does not give another the right to access.
IANAL but that doesn't sound like it would be enforceable at all. Consider that even in the case of something like a (physical) product recall, it would not be legal for them to break into your house to take them back.
Interesting thought. Still, possession is more than nine-tenths of being able to put something up for auction. If you could find a buyer sight-unseen, you'd be liable for fraud, alas. And you'd have given someone incentive to sort the mess out in order to charge you.
It's my understanding that you can take your purchase records to a court, file a complaint against an unnamed party, provide evidence about the current location of the property, and use that to get police intervention (for which the sheriff's department probably charges a fee). This process is needed because you owe the public a duty not to breach the peace, for instance, by breaking down a door and prying the property out of someone's hands.
"Wouldn't a criminal charges of some kind have to be made instead of the process say, a car dealership goes through to repossess a car?"
Unless you want vengeance, worry about getting the property back, not about the crime.
Suppose the buyer of a bass boat dies while it is stored in a rented garage. No crime has been committed, but it will take a court order and a deputy with a bolt cutter for the repo man to get his hands on it.
"Is rent-a-center allowed to surreptitiously record it's customers in case they don't return stuff (without notifying them and/or getting a signed waiver?)."
No, that would violate the implied warranty of fitness for purpose of the merchandise.
What's to stop me from mentioning to a group of friends that I hardly use my Kindle anymore, and one of them offering me $50 for it? ... Do I have to specifically de-register it before the exchange takes place?
Yes?
Is this so different from selling someone a car, a cell phone, a video game console, etc.?
What if I beat my wife nightly and she takes off one day into hiding, taking our Kindle with her? Am I legally allowed to recover any location or usage information (assuming it contains that, like a Fire) to teach her a lesson that leaving me is a bad choice?
You are attempting to confuse a pretty simple issue of property rights by throwing some over-the-top moral issues and potentially bad outcomes into the mix, as if either the morals or the outcomes have a bearing on the property rights situation or the law. You might as well say "What if I steal a Kindle from Adolf Hitler? Should he be allowed to track me down?" The way things "should" be doesn't have a lot to do with this.
In any case, if your abused wife took off with your LoJack or OnStar equipped car, I would expect the theft recovery people would, you know, recover the theft. They wouldn't ask you if you had stopped beating your wife first. They wouldn't first tell you to get the cops involved, then tell you they actually required a court order, then tell you that all data related to your car had been lost.
For a relatively low-value item like a Kindle, perhaps it would have been a fair compromise to tell the owner "Sorry, all we can do is ban the unit from the Amazon network." But that's not what happened in this story.
However, you're talking about an independent third party with authority doing this - the police. About theft of a physical object.
Why should a vendor be able to stop you from using a thing you bought because it looks like one of theirs? No support, sure. Disavow the item, sure. Post warnings on the device as an inbuilt part of the system, sure. But destroy your item? No.
If someone is fraudulently selling cars badged as Fords, Ford itself should not be able to repossess those vehicles. And if Ford thinks that you have stolen their car, they themselves should still not be the ones who repossess it - that's what the police are for. Vigilantism is a bad thing and has all kinds of unexpected failure modes.
The detail you add here is interesting, but not substantial to the point Techdirt is making.
Regardless of how much money this guy made by parallel importing, no one should have the ability to control the sale or distribution of physical property rightfully owned by someone else. He did not steal the property before re-selling it (did he?) -- so your point adds no critical dimension to the problem at hand.
Unless of course you believe that some times some people should be able to control others' physical property, you know, for the good of us all, of course.
Preventing resale isn't so unusual, but having your property violated definitely is.
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