Wired on Friday: Eager clickers on the "update software" button will already be enjoying the fruits of their upgrades to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers (see last week's column).
But it's not just computers that get regular visits from the software upgrade fairy these days. Phones, music players, cameras and even cars can have their internal software, or "firmware", brought up to date.
However, if you do so, you might end up with a nasty surprise: equipment with fewer, not more, features than the device you originally paid for. American purchasers of the Creative Vision:M, for instance, found their $400 (€318) portable MP3, video and radio player suddenly unable to record off the radio, as originally advertised. The upgrade to the latest firmware removes this feature, with no warning apart from a small note in the accompanying text file, buried underneath the "adds language support for Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Turkish" announcement.
There's no practical reason for this mysterious disappearance. The hardware still supports the feature - and there are no more additional options that were moved in to replace it. It's not a legal issue either. Recording radio is an explicitly protected right in US law. It certainly wasn't due to customer demand - no owner of the Vision:M wakes up in the morning, wishing their device could do less. The real reason - at least according to Creative's own tech support - is contractual. Its own tech support team said in response to one angry customer's inquiry: "You may like to know that the FM recording feature is removed due to [ a] licensing issue." The chances are that the licensing issue was tied to the digital rights management (DRM) or copy controls that Creative has to implement in order to play music from many popular download sites.
In order to license this technology for its own players from its creators, Creative may have had to have agreed not to provide FM recording on devices that use it.
Again, there's no practical reason for that. FM recording has no effect on the copy protection - the copy controls are for downloaded music, not over-the-air radio. The creators of the copy protection shouldn't care either - they neither gain nor lose from an FM recording feature.
However, it may have been that while negotiating with music companies to use its particular form of DRM, pressure was put on the copy control creator by the music industry lawyers to include such a clause in their agreement.
In effect, the music industry reached out across several levels of legal contracts to control technologies that are protected by law and it should never have been able to touch.
Some have suggested that the intimidation was more direct and involved the music industry's lawsuit against digital radio recorders, but the RIAA has denied such an involvement.
This is the sort of thing that turns innovation on its head - and ends with the bizarre side- effect of consumer feature sets shrinking, not growing.
Usually, it's the technology companies that compete with new customer features and the music industry reluctantly comes to profit from it. When the first MP3 players appeared on the market in 1998, the RIAA filed a lawsuit to have them banned, before grudgingly allowing them to turn into a multimillion dollar earner for its music label members.
But with this sort of remote control over existing features, technology can be shuttered away from hardware, or even snatched from customers after it has been released.
Take the latest version of TiVo, the digital video recorder.
Previous editions of this handy piece of equipment let American viewers watch their recorded television remotely over the net. You could set TiVo to record your favourite shows, then watch them while on holiday or on work travel.
The feature, called TivoToGo, was mysteriously absent from the new TiVo models. It was removed on the demands of a group called Cable Labs, which owns the proprietary technology required to connect devices to US cable networks.
Users of computer software aren't immune from vanishing features, either. In April 2004, iTunes users found that it could only burn the same playlist on to a CD seven times, not 10. In May, users discovered they could only share their music with users on the same network, instead of with others on the net, again, to keep the music industry happy.
Enterprising enthusiasts have written replacement software for MP3 players, with features that are guaranteed to be free from licensing entanglements. One coding group, the RockBox developers, have even found ways to turn on FM radio receivers on one model of MP3 player - the Archos Recorder v2 - that wasn't advertised as having radios at all!
We think when we buy a piece of hardware, or even a program or song on our computers, that we own it. In most cases, we don't - we've just licensed it under complex conditions that no consumer could be expected to absorb. We are, in the end, renters in the unreal estate of our technologies.
Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
