For continued access to your own property, please insert 25 cents…
When additions are made to the history of great cons, I think the rampant propogation of the license agreement will make the list. Once pretty much limited to computer software and specialized hardware, the past few years have seen us bombarded with companies that no longer wish to sell us a thing – they wish to sell us a license to that thing. We no longer buy music – even if we still buy those little plastic disc thingies. Rather, we buy a license to listen to that music. Similarly, we don’t buy a movie any more, we buy a license to view a movie.
Sony’s new technologies – both Blu-Ray and the upcoming PS3 console – work very hard to reinforce this idea. You don’t buy a game for the PS3, you buy a license (and a non-transferable one, at that) to play the game. When you buy a digital song from iTunes, you buy a license for the song. To carry it even farther, services like Napster sell you a license for the music that can expire if you fail to pay your monthly fees.
And that’s where things start to get sticky. The South Florida Business Journal reports on what happened when a doctor declined to pay the increased tech support fees on Intracare’s popular Dr. Notes software – and they effectively revoked her license. [link via Free Software Magazine]
Dr. Meghan McGovern, of Savannah, Ga., said she couldn’t access her patients’ records or use the program to document patient visits for a week in March. Her tech support contract with Boca Raton-based Dr. Notes was originally for $1,200 a year but the company wanted her to pay $5,000 a year. When McGovern refused, the company didn’t give her an updated monthly password needed to access the program and view records, she said.
Three other doctors – Dr. Thomas Jhee, of Atlanta; Dr. Jonathan Weeks, of Layton, Utah; and Dr. Benzel MacMaster, of Dallas – said they also were denied access to the program for a while by Dr. Notes or its successor Intracare. The owner of Intracare is Maricarmen Beltran, the wife of Dr. Notes CEO and founder Angel Garcia. Clients were told in May Intracare had purchased Dr. Notes’ software.
I can think of few situations worse than a company deciding that it can cut off a doctor’s access to their patients’ records, but I can think of many smaller situations that are still troubling. For writers, consider the effect when a word processor program suddenly started charging yearly – or even monthly – fees to use their software. Fail to pay and lose access to all of your manuscripts. Imagine Adobe deciding you needed to pay by the month to use Illustrator or Photoshop. Freelance designers would find their intellectual property and their livelihoods held hostage.
None of which is quite as creepy as holding your medical records hostage for an exorbitant yearly fee, but all of which are still creepy. One of the drawbacks of the increase in connectivity and power in software appears to be that we may soon not actually own anything, not even the things that we, ourselves, produce.