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FWIW, I'd be more OK with this if liability for later use were then fairly distributed: if you sell me a hammer (or a phone or let me make phone calls), and I can do anything I want with it, and what I want to do is evil, the hammer seller is off the hook; but, if the hammer seller wants to believe they are in control of the use cases of their hammer, and attempts to use legal and/or technological controls to limit what I later do with our hammer (via licenses or digital rights management technology or even an army of moderators), they should be now--at least partially--at fault for what I do with the hammer, and they should suffer consequences along with me, whether it be in the form of costly joint and several liability on a tort claim or even indirect criminal liability from at least negligence if not racketeering charges.

Regardless, as a lot of the weight of your argument seems to rely on the rhetorical use of "entitlement", note that that word applies to both sides: people who sell hammers and then expect to still be involved in the life of the hammer after they sell it are clearly the ones with entitlement issues, and if they didn't want to sell me the hammer then they shouldn't have sold it in the first place; if you want a lot of control over something, you should continue to own it, as it violates the entire notion of selling something and transferring physical possession for you to be continuing to employ legal and technological restrictions that have nothing to do with you anymore. Buyers have no obligation to care one iota about the wishes of a maker after the sale, and it is only due to the messed up incentives and (to many of us) unconstitutional extensions of copyright law in the last 30 years that have made this look even slightly reasonable.



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