I knew a guy that did custom paint work on street rods that the company he worked for built back in the 80s. He also had a side business doing custom paint jobs on guitars. He didn't have anything to do with building the guitars his clients brought to him, just got paid for the work.

If he just bought, say, Telecasters, did custom paint jobs on them, and then sold them for a couple times the retail price, is that something that Fender could step in and put a halt to? And why wouldn't that be a different deal from those Nike shoes?

If I buy something I expect to fucking own the thing.

Sadly I see my bank has announced that my banking app will no longer be supported on my iPhone 5 from next month. Beginning of the end I guess. I like my small phone and it still works perfectly goddamn fine so I'm not happy about this.

Geiginni wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 1:52 pmI've got a 5+ year old iPhone 6s that I'm putting a new battery in and riding out until the iOS updates bloat it out into uselessness. With any luck, I could squeeze another 5 years from that piece of shit.
[...]
A person can't tool around in an F-150, getting a new phone every year

I don't understand why anyone wants to buy a new phone every other year. Do they like spending money or something? I just don't get it. This is even unrelated to the obsolescence and repair issue. You have a phone and it works. Be happy. I mean I hate buying new things, but still. I don't get it. For me it's like the Fight Club scene, "I've got the phone problem handled".

Otherwise that sounds like a pretty good lifespan from a phone. My ipad had at most 5-6 years in it, depending how you count. They stopped releasing updates ages ago, and the number of websites I can use has been steadily decreasing.

iembalm wrote: Sun Aug 01, 2021 8:06 pm I knew a guy that did custom paint work on street rods that the company he worked for built back in the 80s. He also had a side business doing custom paint jobs on guitars. He didn't have anything to do with building the guitars his clients brought to him, just got paid for the work.

If he just bought, say, Telecasters, did custom paint jobs on them, and then sold them for a couple times the retail price, is that something that Fender could step in and put a halt to? And why wouldn't that be a different deal from those Nike shoes?

Probably, and probably under something mundane like a warranty protection. Say the guy disassembles the guitar in order to repaint it and then screws something up when he reassembles it. The person who buys it encounters the defect the painter introduced and says “this is supposed to be a brand new guitar, what gives?” and contacts Fender to correct it under warranty. Fender says no, it’s been modified, you’re out of luck, and a big pissing contest ensues. Companies don’t want to deal with that stuff.

The variation here with customizing new cars and selling them for more with your shop branding is not new. There's been tuner shops and special dealership hot rodding for ages. Got some wild stuff back with late sixties and seventies muscle cars. I think it happens in plenty of countries too. Some Euro place did Porsche tuners, I think. Don't know the legality of it. I imagine there were licensing disputes and all, of which the records are likely available.

The right to repair issue is related but different. Assholes bricking your electric car from a satellite because you lubed your own bushings is bullshit. Likewise with cellphones and John Deer tractors. It's just extortion. And with future electric cars you get the benefit of making dangerous steering columns obsolete while at the same time making your steering interface susceptible to accidental or intentional electrical disconnection. Same with brakes. That might sound far fetched (though some Tesla owners have been dealing with the mundane versions of this for a while). However, you just have to consider what sort of relationship the owner company (they will be just leasing the cars to you) has with the police. It is up to them if they are chummy or not. They can kill your engine from orbit, lock your brakes, and pop your doors and trunk open. They may also share your driving meta data with insurance companies who can then adjust your rates depending on whatever algorithm they decide on. Shit sucks.

I voted Yes, but ...

My waffle is based on a dimly remembered company that existed in the 90's, back before DVDs were a thing. This company would take videotapes of movies like Titanic and splice out the scenes with nudity and sex before reselling to Christian families so that they could enjoy mainstream movies like normal people did. The studios were up in arms and sought to shut down these businesses (my recollection is hazy, because this was 25 years ago; I think I read about it on suck.com back when that was a thing).

And I remember thinking that as much as I hated to admit it to myself, those Christian bowdlerizers were in the right. Morally (Edit: not in the sense that cutting out nudity and sex is moral, but in the sense that it's their moral right to resell edits of the works of others when they're open about the sorts of material they're excising), if not legally. But I would have been pissed if someone bought copies of my movies and took a scissors to them.

Totally within their rights to ruin a video tape if that's what they want to do. But if you try to splice video the picture WILL roll because you'll be disrupting the sync track. But hey, if you want to censor your LPs with a dremel, have at it.

Anthony Flack wrote: Sun Aug 29, 2021 5:03 pm Totally within their rights to ruin a video tape if that's what they want to do. But if you try to splice video the picture WILL roll because you'll be disrupting the sync track. But hey, if you want to censor your LPs with a dremel, have at it.

Those Christian censors weren't literally splicing when they cut out those offending scenes, obviously. However they managed to do it, it worked well enough that the studios took legal action against them.

Took me some Googling, but I found it. Looks like I was off by a decade. The Directors Guild of America expressed a desire to sue companies that censored their movies, and CleanFlicks preemptively sued. The aftermarket movie censors lost.

I think that those bluenoses should have been allowed to resell censored movies, as long as they bought a legit copy for every one they sold and made it clear that their product had scenes removed. But I can also understand why directors like Scorsese and Soderbergh would be adamantly against it, even to the point of using the courts to stop CleanFlicks and their ilk from operating.

If they were doing anything other than chopping tape, I am thinking there would be a way to argue illegal duplication was involved.

Kinda funny that Hollywood directors got so worked up about Christians censoring their films when today the entirety of Hollywood willingly cuts out anything the Chinese Communist Party might find objectionable for any reason.