Posted by Wayne Parham [ 64.149.49.21 ] on August 01, 2008 at 13:00:43:

In Reply to: DirectTV DVR's posted by Jim R. Daley on August 01, 2008 at 05:13:24:

Try to sell them on eBay. In Tulsa, I don't think you'll have much of a market. I think DirectTV will support them but I know Cox won't. I own a Motorola 6416 DVR that's exactly the same as the one I rent from Cox, but they refuse to enable it for me. They say theirs is different internally, but I don't think that is so. I think all they have to do is enter its serial number into their system, same as all the other Motorola 8416 DVR's they use.

I wonder how they can get away with this, because in the computer world, this kind of thing is considered an illegal tying arrangement and has been ruled against in several precedent cases, like Amdahl v IBM, Digidyne v Data General and USA v Microsoft. Seems to me that maybe the only reason they are able to get away with it is the rental ownership costs are small enough nobody is going to start a lawsuit for the kind of money involved. But then again, seems to me this would be some kind of class action thing. Who knows, maybe it will be some time.

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