Jon Honeyball has an important update for hardware owners: we’re all licensees now

The news that DJI, that purveyor of fine flying drones, would be grounding its Spark product from a particular date unless you updated its firmware has caused quite a rumpus. Unless you updated, the drone would simply refuse to fly. I’m assuming that something sensible happens if you’re actually flying as the clock ticks over midnight. However, given it’s likely that this would be in the dark, it wouldn’t be wise to be flying then anyway.

Cue the usual furore. Indignant comments such as “how dare they force me to update?” have been splatted across the intertubes. But it has opened up the whole question of the rights of companies to force you to update.

I have a Spark and it’s a fine piece of technology. Its ability to fly in a stable and reliable fashion, despite sometimes fearsome crosswinds, is truly a sight to behold. It’s as state of the art as you can get when it comes to drones/quadcopters.

DJI has made it clear that there is a rare issue under which the battery appears to give out, and some Sparks have dropped from the sky. Clearly, having your laptop or phone battery die unexpectedly is suboptimal, but it’s a whole different level of “ooops” when the motors give out on a drone flying above your head. I’m perfectly happy with DJI forcing such an update on its userbase under those circumstances.

A similar squeal has been heard about Sonos after it updated its terms and conditions. In short, it needs to collect data to support its new voice-control integration. Sonos will be offering support for Alexa, which means the data has to jump from the Sonos product to Amazon’s back-end processing. Clearly the terms and conditions must be updated here to support this.

Now some commentators have pointed out that if you don’t accept these new terms and conditions, you won’t get future updates and your product will be frozen in time. Because of that, not only will you not receive new features but there’s no guarantee that existing ones will keep working.

Is this reasonable? What rights do I, as a consumer, have to demand that items are supported into the future? This is especially true when hardware is involved, because you can end up with a device that’s essentially a dumb brick if the software stops working.

I accept that my Sky Q box is tied to the Sky service, and that if Sky goes away, the box has no real residual functionality. Indeed, I understood from my Sky installer chap who recently did the upgrade at home that the new Q boxes legally still belong to Sky. It’s a true subscription service.

But how does that subscription model play out when there is a software component tied to a lump of hardware that I’ve paid hard money for and consider mine? Does a vendor really have the right to impose new terms and conditions on its customers? I’m no lawyer, but my strong, armchair-lawyer hunch is that such a change is illegal under UK law because it represents a one-sided change of contract after the event.

And what do we want as customers? If we object to a change in the terms and conditions, do we have the right to return the product as not being “fit for purpose”? In other words, it isn’t what I bought, mister, so have it back and return my money forthwith.

On the one hand, I can see the issue here – I don’t want my hand forced by a vendor pushing me to upgrade. On the other hand, look at the utter mess that Windows and Android have got into, with such a wide variety of versions of both the operating systems and the applications running on top of them.

Now there are lies, damn lies and statistics, but recent data from netmarketshare.com puts Windows 7 at 48.91% of the market, Windows 10 at 27.63%, Windows 8.1 at 6.48% and XP at 6.1%, which, if nothing else, shows how slowly Windows 10 is gaining on Windows 7. And that’s an overall view: I saw some statistics recently that suggested that Windows 10 had only just outpaced XP on the corporate desktop.

Doubtless there will be a test case at some point, when a customer tries to return a product to the shop claiming that they’re not prepared to accept new terms and conditions and that they want their money back. And although the shop might just capitulate on a case-by-case basis, at some point these chickens will come home to roost, and both customers and the retail channel will push back against such changes.

If I was selling a hardware/software combination, I would be thinking carefully about the implications for my business in the future. There could be a rude shock just around the corner.

My strong, armchair-lawyer hunch is that such a change is illegal under UK law