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Automakers To Gearheads: Stop Repairing Cars
Mr_Blank writes Automakers are supporting provisions in copyright law that could prohibit home mechanics and car enthusiasts from repairing and modifying their own vehicles. In comments filed with a federal agency that will determine whether tinkering with a car constitutes a copyright violation, OEMs and their main lobbying organization say cars have become too complex and dangerous for consumers and third parties to handle. The dispute arises from a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that no one thought could apply to vehicles when it was signed into law in 1998. But now, in an era where cars are rolling computing platforms, the U.S. Copyright Office is examining whether provisions of the law that protect intellectual property should prohibit people from modifying and tuning their cars.
I'm not Joe Mechanic or anything like that, but I know enough to change my air, fuel & oil filters, add fluids, etc. I've even done tune-ups on my older cars, but what about the real grease monkeys who can fix anything on a vehicle? Wouldn't this type of law put the Auto-Zones, Napas & the like out of business? I don't know where they get the majority of their sales, but I know a sizeable amount has to come from home car repair/tuning enthusiasts.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The DMCA act actually prohibits rooting your phone, there is an exception to the law presently, but it needs to be renewed every few years unlike the DMCA...
So yeah, there is a law that prohibits it, luckily a few individuals brought it to a court and got an exception for that particular case, for now.
Sales is all they understand. Now they would like to force you to use them for service. Next it will be "Remove all cars more than X years old because of pollution ( I know, you think a car manufacturer would not touch that topic, but they will) and safety issues. The only thing you can do is convert an old car to electric (and they will scream about safety for that too) and not buy a car under the new terms.
From a legislative point of view, an automobile conveys more personal freedom than anything other than weapons. Therefor it will be constrained, (you can only drive this or that type of vehicle) then limited (i. e. mass transit or autonomous-cabs for the masses), then restricted (as in "Hey you middle class,go huddle with the masses") until only the elite have actual freedom of movement.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Everyone who was technically astute and aware, on sites such as this, raised concerns of this very nature. While I don't have the reference at the tip of my finger, I feel that I can state with some certainty that this very possibility was raised, by explaining how applying the DMCA to cars would prevent you from modifying, repairing, or otherwise working on your car, or even taking it to a third party mechanic. (After all, since when has Slashdot been able to resist a car analogy?)
No, the people that "didn't realize this" are the politicians and proponents of the DMCA and other horrible laws like it, and the others who bought the line of BS being fed to them by those proponents - the people who dismissed such objections as the being "outlandish," "preposterous," or similarly unrealistic. We tried to tell them, and they ignored us.
Is there nothing more American than taking a mass market car and finding another 10 horsepower?
Or making the stereo loud enough to knock down old barns as you drive by?
What if immersing your motherboard in liquid nitrogen for another 3 frames per second were illegal?
Or writing your own operating system could land you in jail?
What have we come to? We need to protect people from doing stupid stuff, but nobody wants to live in a world with only one flavor...
A.
Depends heavily on the state, county, etc.
I was pretty livid living in Harris County (Houston, TX), driving past the petro-refineries pumping out visible tons of pollution per day to take my 3rd round smog test because my 1600cc car that I drive 4000 miles a year was measuring 230ppm hydrocarbons instead of the legal 220 - meanwhile our 5900cc pickup truck had a legal limit of 330ppm....
I own three cars that I regularly work on.
I have tuners and tuning software that allows me to write my own set of parameters to run the car by.
The learning curve is hard, benefits are low unless you are constantly tinkering, and the cost of entry and training is pretty high.
I do not think Ford gives a rat's ass about my activities; my cars are too old to be on their radar.
None of my cars are Fly-Bt-Wire.
I have Real Brakes, Real Steering, and Real throttle action. Not going to say those won't fail, but they are a well proven technology.
I've reprogrammed all three cars to match various modifications, engine swaps, etc. It takes changing computer tables/values to get everything working well together.
This kind of "Programming" is more like changing the build file and recompiling with new values; you are not changing structure, just INI files, kinda.
I can't conceive of a circumstance that a bad ini file could cause a problem in the program structure... lol.
That said: In no way would I ever tinker with a FBW computer; the factory code could Crash my car from a WOT throttle event or some such shit Stock, without any help from me.
If you haven't read it, search out the settlement to the Toyota problems; the code review (postmortem, no less) was brutal.
They violated pretty much every rule I know for real time code; and didn't even realize they were having intermittent stack overflows.
They thought they were using a few stack locations; one routine used 30+, lol.
They didn't go to jail; a normal citizen would in a heartbeat.
They also don't want anyone dicking with their "InfoTainment" revenues; if your car has a cellphone, it's talking about you. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Ironically the Italians are the worst at this sort of stuff. Ever catch a glimpse of the Ferrari agreements? They actually prohibit you from selling your car to anyone that Ferrari doesn't approve for two years after purchase.
Apparently it's to keep the collector's value high.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
Ok, automakers want to force me to obey their license terms? WHERE ARE THEY?
I've never had a dealer make me sign a EULA or license terms to use the car they just sold me... Go ahead guys, TRY IT!.
Once you do this, I'm going to review all the software I can find in my car and start looking for Open Source libraries in all that fancy user interface stuff you are providing now and make you comply to the license terms for it all. I have a feeling that we will find that you have some legal problems..
Next they are going to try this on hand tools....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Nothing a nice, expensive official repair shop won't fix.
Well, somebody needs to play Devil's Advocate here, so I will. What if onboard vehicle computers truthfully are (or soon will become) so complicated - and so integral to the functioning of the vehicle - that an untrained hobbyist screwing with it could cause injury or death? What if some homebrew-loving gearhead hacker decides to roll his own firmware for the car because he thinks he can squeeze some extra MPG out of it, and instead it zeroes out the odometer due to a glitch? Or disables the seatbelt warnings? Or randomly cuts of f the engine in the middle of the highway?
Yes, it can be argued that negligent behavior causing death or injury already has penalties, but those are after the fact. We all understand how easy it is to screw up software. Do we want to be reactive or penalize it in the first place? Might it not be reasonable to say in effect that cars with owner-modified computers are fine but are no longer street legal?
P.S. No, I don't work for a car company, I'm not a shill or a troll. In fact I generally find cars quite boring. But I find Slashdot even more boring when nobody attempts to find merit in a contrary opinion...
"95% of all Slashdot
My response is: That's YOUR (the automaker's) fault for making them that way, and therefore you need to change your habits, not me.
Same here. My .last experience with the dealer was when one of the window regulators broke (E46 BMW so it is a common problem). It looked like it was going to rain so I inquired what it would cost for them to install it and got some absurd number like $800 most of which was 2.5 hours of labor. I flat out told them it doesn't take 2.5 hours and said that I would pay for 1 hour of labor. They insisted that this was way too low and that they could get it done in 2 hours. So I left with a new regulator, plastic clip and nut and went home. At the time my 5 year old wanted to help and learn how to fix the car so I let him do most of it and he managed to do it in a little more than a hour.
Time to offend someone