I mean, that would have been true up until very recently in history.

Sure, but the company fronted the millions of dollars required to develop the technology. The investment needs to come from somewhere.

That doesn’t have to be a private company, though. We need public funding that retains the patent rights, if not just to make the invention free from licensing costs to manufacture.

The insane thing about our current system is that we do have public funding, but private companies wind up with the patent anyway

I’m don’t

You sure you’re not?

So that’s what happened to my Blu-ray drive on my PC! I had to flash the firmware to a custom version for ripping to get it to read anything.

That is incredibly shitty behavior. I’m putting the disk that I purchased into my own hardware. The studio already got my money from the sale, why the hell do they care?

Nah. This would require an update be sent out to every blu ray player, which is not feasible unless they were all standardized to a single database or service for their license keys.

Even if that were the case, which it’s not, the device would need to connect to the internet for this scheme to work.