A jack of all trades
When Google announced its new line of Pixel smartphones, it directed some not-so-subtle shade at rival Apple, touting the Pixel’s “satisfyingly not new” 3.5mm headphone jack.
In case you haven’t heard, Apple’s newest iPhone ditched the once-ubiquitous standard headphone jack in favor of a new proprietary Lightning port. The move sparked plenty of reactions — some positive, most critical. But one implication of Apple’s decision hasn’t been fully appreciated; it reveals the slow erosion of consumer ownership of and control over the products they buy.
The headphone jack has been a staple of audio devices for decades. From turntables and cassette decks to portable CD players and the iPod, if it played music, you’d find a headphone jack. Because the technology was free to use, it helped ensure that your favorite headphones would work on just about any audio device you came across. And the 3.5mm jack was a multipurpose standard. You could use it to connect not only your headphones, but speakers, car stereos or even recording devices.
In its pursuit of ever-more-svelte devices, Apple maintains that the 3.5mm jack is simply too bulky. Its elimination is consistent with other space-saving measures the company has introduced. The original iMac did away with the floppy disk drives, and in 2012 Apple did the same with optical drives. The latest MacBooks jettison nearly every port, save a single USB Type-C connection and — rather ironically — the headphone jack.
Apple insists its decision to remove the 3.5mm jack was motivated purely by design considerations and that any other explanation is “pure, paranoid conspiracy theory.” But as history has shown, the Motion Picture Association of America is no stranger to asking agencies to limit the use of an output control.
Taking Apple at its word, there are now three ways to get audio output from an iPhone: through a Lightning-compatible device, over the iPhone’s AirPlay wireless feature and via Bluetooth. All three are proprietary technologies that require device makers to pay a hefty license fee. The first two are owned by Apple. While Apple doesn’t control Bluetooth, it paid $3 billion for Beats, the world’s largest wireless headphone company, just two years ago. So no matter how you listen, Apple profits. You probably can kiss the days of buying cheap $5 headphones at the corner drugstore goodbye.
But the bigger problem is that, unlike the headphone jack, all three of these audio output channels interpose software code between you and your music and podcasts. With the old headphone jack, you plug a device in and — to borrow a phrase from Apple — it just works. But with Lightning, Airplay and Bluetooth, software checks to see if your device is licensed, if it’s running the latest firmware or even if an app maker or copyright holder has restricted playback. In short, software code could allow Apple or third parties to control how, when and where you access audio on your phone. To be clear, this hasn’t happened yet, but software makes it possible.
What’s more, copyright law prevents consumers from removing, bypassing or fooling with these sorts of software locks. Digital rights management (DRM) tools are protected under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In practice, the DMCA means copyright holders and device makers can exert control over how you use the products you buy. You might think you own your phone, but in many ways, you don’t.
The loss of the headphone jack is just the latest reminder that our ownership of software-enabled devices like smartphones is much more tenuous and much more conditional than our ownership of purely analog products. Remember when the world woke up to find a largely unwanted U2 album on their phones? One reason that freebie angered so many iPhone users is that it disturbed our sense that we own our devices and control what goes on them.
Or take Apple’s recent patent on infrared technology that can be used to disable a smartphone camera. By sending an invisible infrared signal, a performer, concert venue or camera-shy police department could disable your phone’s photo and video recording functions.
The legal fight for control over our smartphones has been raging for more than a decade. Until President Barack Obama signed a bill in 2014, the question was whether consumers could lawfully unlock their cell phones — that is, whether they could remove or bypass software locks that prevented them from using their phone on a new carrier’s network. Before the law, AT&T could use software to prevent you from switching to Verizon.
A similar fight is still playing out over jailbreaking smartphones — the practice of accessing or altering a device’s operating system in order to install third-party software. If you own an iPhone, Apple prevents you from installing software that hasn’t passed its rigorous and often inscrutable App Store approval process. Do you really own a device if you can’t decide what software it can run? Luckily, the U.S. Copyright Office granted a temporary three-year exemption from the DMCA for jailbreaking in 2015. But the legal future of jailbreaking remains far from certain.
When consumers can’t alter or remove the DRM locks on their devices, they are at the mercy of device makers and copyright holders. The recent history of abuse of the power software provides is not encouraging. Amazon used the software embedded in its Kindle devices to delete purchased books remotely — including, perhaps fittingly, George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eight-Four.” John Deere uses software locks to prevent home repairs of its tractors and shut out independent repair shops. Keurig has leveraged embedded software to control the market for consumable products like coffee pods, much like printer manufacturers have done with ink cartridges. The Nest home-automation system used the power of software to brick thousands of Revolv home-automation hubs unilaterally, over the objections of their owners. What each of these examples illustrate is that software takes control away from consumers and chips away at their personal property rights.
It’s time for the law to recognize the need to protect consumers’ reasonable expectations that they own — and control — the products they buy.
Image by Poravute Siriphiroon
