I thought I bought a camera, but no DJI sold me a license to use it [video]

Not watching a video, but how is it legal for any company to "sell" something like this? (The video might explain that, but that's my focus of what I care about out of the situation.)

You’re free to not buy it, that’s why. This video is the market working as intended.

It's about false advertising: they say "our product gets images like this and that", which is Okay and something the buyer uses to base their decision. And there is an expectation that their product will do as advertised. But they never say front-and-center "our product won't function without a valid Internet connection and an approved photo ID, because we use our product to harvest your data."

We have laws about false advertising and such things. At a minimum, there's a case to be made with respect to the warranty of merchantability.

It’s also not allowed to sell a coffee machine that electrocutes its users every time it’s turned on, then burns down the house for good measure.

Sure, someone will make a video “this coffee machine killed my wife and burned down my house with my children in it”, and you would say it’s the market working as intended…

There are standards the stuff sold need to meet, even if ultimately you are always “free to not buy it”.

The problem with letting “the market” decide things like this is it requires first that someone gets hurt. Then they need to wage and information campaign against said company. Or we can just have a law that says this is bad and be done with it.

Unchecked lawmaking hurts a lot more people than bad consumer products.

We have a good system, and this video shows it functions well.

Markets are tools.

They are good at some things (allocating resources, adapting to changing supply and demand, revealing preferences and discovering prices, incentivising innovation and socially useful risk taking, …)

and bad at others (ensuring new entrants don’t repeatedly make the same safety mistakes, preventing exploitation of customers, protecting IP, solving for long term social needs, maintaining national resilience against threats, preventing waste…)

Fetishisation of markets is the issue.

Though markets and generally free trade are incredibly important and have brought (and hopefully will continue to bring) great benefits to humanity, they also have downsides, and other tools (regulation, taxation, industrial strategy, …) are needed to balance these.

This is one such case. The market is creating downsides that society should not tolerate.

We have a terrible system, built around power disparity, dishonesty, unequal and difficult access to remedies for dishonesty, and this obsession with the idea that only individuals should act individually, and not collectively as a governing body, to prevent and punish harms.

Have you read enough history to know what life was like before we got rid of child labor, established weekends as a norm, regulated food products, etc.? Or do you assume that the free market provides those things because you’ve only lived in an age where you can take them for granted?

Comments like these and knowing people like you are in charge make me fear for the future.

Companies, unchecked, will kill as many people as they can to make more profit. History proves this, it’s not a hypothetical. Laws are the only lever we have to keep profit incentive aligned with the common good.

> Fetishisation of markets is the issue.

Well said.

It should also be pointed out, that the regulatory laws are what _defines_ the market. They are even more fundamental to a market's existence than the companies producing goods and services, or the consumers buying them.

Without regulatory law, the "market" devolves to a relapse into the warring states era. Why shouldn't amazone hire a mercenary force to blow the vault doors off of Ft. Knox and carry all the gold home to Bozo?

Because there are laws against it! And that would render the action unprofitable. Bozo sure as sh1t doesn't care about stealing from anyone, or even someone getting killed, if it means he gets a bunch more shekels.

The regulatory law is more than just inherent, it's a mandatory component of anything that's going to have more resemblance to a "market" than to Mad Max...

So, the profiting companies actually _require_ a regulatory structure, to prevent the most wealthy and powerful from just taking whatever they have.

The question is in also making these regulations benefit the consumer as well as the supply side.

In the US this part is currently in rather complete failure...