Suppose all the companies that manufactured cars informed customers, in the fine print of the purchase contract, that they could only have the car serviced and repaired at a company-owned dealership.
Suppose, further, that the automakers enforced this rule by installing electronic hood-locks that could be opened only by dealers with authorized hardware and software keys -- and then sued out of existence anyone selling an unauthorized key.
You'd call your member of Congress to complain. And Congress would pass a law prohibiting such a blatantly anti-competitive, anti-customer practice.
Yet something akin to this practice is already in existence, and growing. In the world of electronic devices, digital entertainment and software, customers are routinely subjected to restrictions that forbid modification of products they've already purchased.
Your DVD player is just one example. There's a reason you can't fast-forward through the FBI copyright warning or other material DVD makers put at the start of movies. They won't let you. DVD titles often contain software instructions that DVD players, which can't be made without a license from an industry cartel, are required to obey.
The issue is front and center in an obscure but important legal battle under way in Hong Kong. The three major video-game console makers -- Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft -- have used the courts against a seller of hardware modification chips, often called ``mod chips,'' that give the boxes more capabilities than the makers allow when sold off the shelf.
One of those capabilities was the ability to play unauthorized games -- that is, unauthorized copies of copyrighted games. It was irrelevant to the console makers, and so far to the court, that the chips could be used for entirely reasonable purposes. For example, they also let users play games that the game makers have only released in other regions of the world -- something the game hardware doesn't allow. They also let console owners run other kinds of software, such as the Linux operating system, not specifically authorized by the makers.
The console makers have a problem, no doubt, but they've helped create it themselves. They've established a business model that relies on selling consoles at a loss, then profiting from the highly controlled sale of licensed games.
The regional coding scheme, also used with DVD movies, is part of the entertainment industry's effort to totally control distribution of its products -- and profits. The industry chooses when and where to release games and movies and what price to charge in each part of the globe for essentially the same product.
This blatantly anti-competitive process is nothing but market manipulation. For reasons that escape me, these giant companies get away with it.
It's not at all clear that the manufacturers will win their case in Hong Kong, though they did get an injunction forcing the mod-chip seller, Lik Sang (www.lik-sang.com), to stop selling the gear while the case was proceeding. A similar case in Australia went against the console makers, and Hong Kong's laws may be even more favorable for the mod-chip crowd.
I met earlier this month in Hong Kong with Alex Kampl, who, until the lawsuit, was one of Lik Sang's owners. He and a partner, who have effectively put the company under new ownership, are spending their time defending themselves against these patently unfair charges.
Kampl gave me a demonstration of the console companies' hypocrisy. He took me to a major retailer of music, movies and game software in the center of Hong Kong. There on the shelf were game titles labeled with United States regional coding -- in a place where the game makers don't sell U.S.-coded consoles.
He took one of the games to a clerk and asked how he was supposed to play it. ``Oh,'' said the clerk, ``you have to put in some of those special chips.'' Kampl shook his head, visibly frustrated.
He'll be back in court early next month, he said. I'm crossing my fingers for him.
In the United States, the infamous 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives makers of technology almost absolute rights to control its use. But in an extremely visible prosecution, a San Jose jury acquitted a Russian software company this week of charges that it was selling a tool for disabling the copy protection in electronic-book software. If that verdict is a harbinger, my worries will diminish.
If it's not, watch out. These prosecutions are designed to help big corporations thwart purchasers of their products from doing eminently legal and reasonable things with what they've bought because of the possibility that some people will use them to infringe on a copyright or disrupt a business model.
Software is becoming a component of more and more physical products. My car example may not be so far off the mark, because cars are turning into computers on wheels.
We shouldn't allow big companies to tell us precisely how we may use the products we buy from them. In their world, a liberated customer is always wrong.