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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.
you simply get to use it, and the automaker gets a final say in how you use your car. good grief.
To purchase a nice car from the 60's or 70's with no computer. Easy to fix, and except for crash-readyness usually pretty solid.
Why don't the automakers just seek refuge under the DMCA from all those evil automobile hackers? Clearly, figuring out how your car works is a direct attack on the very hard work and property of those automakers.
Time to pass a bill state by state. I'm the sure the invisible hand of the free market will line all the right politicians' pockets to rush those through. Hopefully someday we won't be able to own our cars and we can go back to the Ma Bell days when every phone was rented.
My work here is dung.
Whilst the DMCA may or may not be a good thing, it is certainly not a means for the car manufacturers to impose a SAFETY based restriction. That organisations pull that sort of abuse is why the legal system is held in contempt.
...didn't think that usage rights could be restricted to cars too. Ebooks and Emusic was just the beginning...
" 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"
Do the editors even read this site ? Virtually everyone realized this could apply to just about anything that ran code. There was even the infamous use garage door opener case
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...
And the HP and Lexmark toner cartridge cases which were just about embedded serialization
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.
Being able to maintain your own care can help a lot if you aren't financially well off. I have an '03 VW Jetta TDI Wagon that I bought with 239,000 miles on it, and I've been able to fix every problem it had (and to be honest there haven't been many) all by myself. I diagnosed changed my own thermostat when mine failed, which would've probably cost me a pretty penny instead of 30 or 40 bucks in OEM parts. I had to replace the glass in one of my mirrors once. It took me about 15 seconds to connect the heat wires and snap it into place. The dealership quoted me $50 to do what was quite literally 15 seconds worth of work.
I'm also not convinced that auto makers can't do things do make cars more easily repairable by amateurs, and this idea of a car that's too complex for someone with the ability to fix is not an economically viable one from my standpoint. As a college student, I can't afford to spend $300 to have some dolt in a dealership replace my alternator and do it wrong when I can do it myself at the cost of a little time and have it done correctly.
As a final note, I've worked in the automotive industry among design and RMA engineers, and a lot of them aren't half as smart as they think they are, and even the OEMs get confused at how to work on their own crap, and I know having seen mechanics reports in a return material analysis lab that the people doing the repair work don't always know that much about the vehicles they're working on anyway, even with dealership and OEM support. We've had electronic power steering gears returned with the dealership claiming there was a power steering fluid leak. Seriously.
When you start your new car for the first time, an FBI warning replaces the metering display and an annoying voice from the sound system asks; "You wouldn't pirate a movie, would you?"
sounds like windows 10 to me :D
or adobe
or Ebooks
or iTunes
In 100 years it will be determined that home based human baby producing process is too dangerous. All the enthusiasts and hobbyists are at great risk of infringing of the global law, 1 baby per family, and are at risk of procreating unauthorized offspring.
(at least the ones who think this is a good idea)
Fuck off and die, preferably in a fire.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
From now on, sticking with cars made before this stupid concept went into effect.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The DMCA does indeed suck. You should let your senator know that you don't want this and maybe even create one of those presidential petitions?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
A cynic might suspect that this is the automakers' response to the coming of the electric car, with its much lower maintenance costs.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Fuck you.
Show me a car that I'm not allowed to fix, and I'll show you a car that I won't allow myself to buy.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
How are we supposed to make a car analogy now?
How many deaths and injuries are caused by modded car systems? Is this a large enough value to measure outside a single standard deviation on the number of deaths and injuries caused by motor vehicles?
If the answer to the first is an actual value and the answer to the second is yes, than I have no problem with this. However, if it isn't (which is likely), they should take their FUD and go home, and come back when there's an actual (societal) problem that needs to be fixed.
This is less "Eagle has landed" and more "First stage of Falcon 9 has...landed".
From the article;
Industry concerns are mounting that modifying these ECUs and the software coding that runs them could lead to vulnerabilities in vehicle safety and cyber security. Imagine an amateur makes a coding mistake that causes brakes to fail and a car crash ensues. Furthermore, automakers say these modifications could render cars non-compliant with environmental laws that regulate emissions.
This is not about replacing brakes, oil changes, replacing spark plugs, etc. It is about making software changes that most people do not have the experience or knowledge to do.
Repairing the detuning that DOT and insurance companies forced the car makers to do.
Nothing new under the sun. Removing the asthma tube from the intercooler on my old Eclipse made it non-CA legal.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If manufacturers don't want people tinkering with their systems because they are genuinely concerned about public safety, then it seems to me like they are already covered... there's no need to bring the DMCA into it at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Rural voters are going to raise a stink about this. It's a national pastime there. Ironically they'll probably blame it on "gov't control", when in fact it's based on laws pushed by big corporations.
Table-ized A.I.
Came here to say this. This has nothing to do with replacing your spark plugs or ball joints. This is about modding your ECU. That said, I think that if a manufacturer ships an ECU that can be modded to such a degree that it causes the brakes to fail, the manufacturer bears a lot of that fault. However, in general, cars aren't cell phones or PCs. It's no big deal if you load up Cyanogenmod and your phone crashes. It's a pretty big deal if you flash your ECU and you lose traction through a turn thanks to some modified vehicle dynamics and kill someone.
If they do this, they're going against the magnuson moss act.
In a just world they would lose copyright when they stop warranting the product. You want copyright of that ecu? You give a permanent warranty on it and replace them every time they fail, for free. Don't want to have to replace it? then you give up copyright to the code on it because user needs to fix it. I'm not holding my breath though.
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.
The more normal uses that the DMCA distrupts and therefore the more disgrunted owners of common technologies then the more hope that there will be a movement to overthrown that aberration of law.
-no sig today-
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
No, you can't modify the self-driving software to make your car fly. Or exceed the speed limit. Or run over small children.
Automakers don't want any more liability exposure than they already have.
Crap, "Transformers" is becoming real.
Table-ized A.I.
Religious leaders are supporting provisions in copyright law that could prohibit home writers and book enthusiasts from repairing and modifying their own bibles. In comments filed with a federal agency that will determine whether tinkering with a bible constitutes a copyright violation, churches and their main lobbying organisation say bibles have become too complex and dangerous for believers and third parties to even scribble in. The dispute arises from a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that no one thought could apply to bibles when it was signed into law in 1998. But now, in an era where books are text files, the U.S. Copyright Office is examining whether provisions of the law that protect intellectual property should prohibit people from modifying or even put boogers in their hardcopy bibles.
It sounds like it would be in the interests of public safety, to use their own quotations to support an injunction from them being able to sell these unsafe cars.
Just as unmaintainable computers should not be allowed on the Internet, unmaintainable cars should not be allowed on public roads.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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 seriously considering the two options mentioned in the subject, but one would be driven (cough) to do so. Really? Or is this some kind of smoke screen to hide other changes that are coming? As in "I'm going to KILL you!!" - "Oh, please don't kill me!" - "OK, I'll just take your money instead." - "Oh, thank you! Thank you!"
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
https://transportevolved.com/2...
Maybe they have a more compelling argument than most, but I agree you can "see where this is heading" and how the rest of the manufacturers are following suit.
I want to know how driving any of these cars is legal any more?
A lot of states and/or municipalities have poorly written laws about using a two-way-communications device while driving.
Since these cars are more computer than machine, and with Onstar or Sync and so forth they may be constantly communicating, it would seem driving one of these vehicles is outlawed in many places.
Even more so if you consider the cars with anti-collision technology.
(Maybe this is what is really driving the autonomous car movement - we can't continue to sell cars that are computers, until/unless the car drives itself, without being in violation of these anti-driving-and-texting/communicating/electronic device laws)
I drove to work today in a 1973 IH Scout II. I doubt I need to worry about IHC sending me a take-down notice..
When IBM said you could not service their typewriters, fought to gain access to manuals and parts.
We're gonna have to have this fight over cars. I service my cars regularly,repairing items from brakes to heater cores. When I finally buy one younger than 2006 I will have to confront the electronics, the locked-down systems, and the self-diagnostics that will not tell me anything beyond 'take me to a dealer'. then I will be disappointed.
I can understand the desire manufacturers have to lock their ECU code and such, but it's past that, and something as simple as sticky window could result in a code thrown, needing to use the dealer tool to reset the computer that supervised that, and being a bit lighter in the pocket than you expected.
Having driven a Saab 900NG, the Tech II tool was allegedly needed for everything from a disconnected battery to a sticky convertible top. I got past every one of those issues, but back then Saab and GM had not yet envisioned the opportunity for exploitation. The 900NG merely had electronics where mechanisms had been. They missed the boat. Not that Saab ever made things easy to fix - my mechanic reminding me the only right way to do most engine service was to drop the subframe... Thanks buddy...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
For years these pricks have been ripping off their customers with deceptive pricing and dealer networks that are nothing more than a middle man. They want you to believe that you have to bring your car to the dealer for service but if you read the fine print you will see that any competent neighborhood mechanic can service you car and not void the warranty.
Then along comes Tesla and Uber and others that threaten their monopolies. So instead of changing their business to suit the way consumers want it they double down and try to lock you in. Right out of the playbook of the movie studios and cable companies and utilities. They will litigate and use political pressure to force you to play the game the way they want it played. Same old same old.
If someone made an open source car I'd buy it.
If they're going to be like that about it, how's about setting up a copyright-free car project that you could build down at the local makerspace? You could probably do something on the order of complexity of the Ariel Atom without too much difficulty, and pull in an engine from a local junkyard. If that's what it takes to own your own car in this day and age, the guys the automakers are cock-blocking are more than capable of coming up with the designs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We want you to buy a new car every 3 years and with auto drive cars they will shutdown after software updates end after 2-3 years.
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
This is about locking down their future business model.
No one but Dealer Certified folks will be allowed to even LOOK at the software running the car. Anyone pointing out vulnerabilities and zero-days will be charged with everything under the sun because recalls cost a lot of money. I mean, we can always count on the manufacturers to do the right thing when it comes to safety right ? ( cough *ignition switch issues*, cough *toyotas phantom acceleration issues*, cough *Fords randomly catching fire*, cough *Bridgestone tires* )
Absolutely ! Because lives always > profits ! lol
and to replace like with like you'll have to buy it from the manufacturer because no third party will be able to make it talk to the car's network, so they'll be able to raise their prices arbitrarily.
Says the AC who probably isn't old enough to drive and thus enjoy the experience of being charged 3x normal price for " Certified " parts at the local dealership.
Kill off nascar, mechanics, after market upgrades, personalization this is the type of crap that will push everyone against the DCMA resulting in wide spread copy write law reform. I hope these greedy bastards get exactly what they want in the short term then get blind sided by the tidal wave of consumer revolt that ensues.
forever.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Mega squirt and home built cars. The way of the future.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Of course a lot of people thought. They've warned of such scenarios back there, and they could do nothing, just as little can be done now.
-><- no
I have found that in recent (say 10 or so) years dealerships have become a lot more cost competitive; at least for some types of repairs and maintenance procedures. One example I have noticed is with oil changes. My car uses synthetic oil, and a lot of it. I priced out what it would cost me to change the oil myself if I bought the appropriate oil at the local parts store, and the filter. I then called the dealership and their cost to me for the same was only $5 more. If I had done it myself I would have spent $5 running the used oil somewhere for disposal, and likely had to spend time afterwards cleaning up part of my garage. it was well worth the $5 to let them do it.
I have found other similar situations with brake jobs (I would normally do these myself but in situations involving stuck calipers or parking brake pads that won't release, I call and price it out at the dealership and local brake shops).
Now, I haven't encountered the need for a really large repair yet. I don't know if this scales or not. But it does suggest that the dealerships are aware of consumers pricing out these things and have brought their charges down in response.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If their products are too complex and dangerous, perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to sell them.
I think they kiddies call It call "Street Legal"
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Draconian/dystopian controls are completely unnecessary. Population explosion projections fall prey to the xkcd rule on extrapolation - they don't properly account for the impact that modern technology/medicine/family planning options have.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say our problem isn't going to be having too many babies, it's going to be having enough of them.
Several advanced nations have already fallen well below replacement level (i.e., roughly 2 births per female). The USA is even one of those nations at 1.88 births per woman as of 2012. Some places are even worse, like South Korea at 1.3, a rate at which if it continues, the South Korean population would be gone by 2700 or so (though of course, see previous statement on extrapolation). It's true for pretty much every sufficiently advanced nation. The USA and many of these countries have started replacing their population via immigration (which is why the US population is still growing despite the slowing birth rate), but that's only going to work for so long...
Because it's spreading. In 1970, Mexico's birth rate was 6.72 per female. In 2012, it had fallen to 2.22. What about India? 5.49 in 1970, 2.50 in 2012. Yes, it's still pretty high in some of the most undeveloped nations, but that will change, not because governments enforce it, but because on the whole people want it.
Dont't tell us what to do!
We are your customers and you don't have a business without us!
Don't forget the moment your product or business model steps outside of the lines of what we decide to spend our hard- earned money on, rest assured we will go elsewhere! This is just the nature of the game and you already know this!
I remember telling my friends well over ten years ago that if cars got any harder to work on, then eventually only the dealers would be able to repair them.
As an example, the last pickup truck I drove had super easy to replace headlights. I actually replaced one of them at night in the rain on the side of the road (I always keep a spare) using no tools. The truck I'm driving now has the hardest to replace headlights I've ever seen. I had to take it to the dealer to have one replaced, and even the mechanic had a hard time with it. GMC had learned a lesson in the few years between those two trucks. They had made the first one way too easy.
Ridiculous!
I don't take kindly to being talked down to. "This new car has computery things in it and more sensors! A lowly commoner such as yourself couldn't possibly understand it! You should be restricted from modifying it, even if you buy it!" Well you can piss right the fuck off then, because it sounds to me like you don't want my money. I'll find somebody who does want money. Or just continue to maintain and upgrade my current car. I've been perfectly fine changing my own brakes, engine, transmission, suspension components and ECU for years now. I don't need somebody to come in, treat me like a child and restrict that too.
Printer manufacturers tried this several years ago with chips in ink cartridges. The supreme court ruled it was ok to reverse engineer the code on these chips if it was required to allow other companies to make make compatible cartidges. I would think the same would apply to cars and after market parts and upgrades.
"cars have become too complex and dangerous for consumers and third parties to handle..." Ya don't say? The sucker is loaded with fuel that rates at dozen or more sticks of dynamite per gallon, spews poisonous gas while running properly, and doing the wrong thing to a MacPherson strut assembly can put a hole in something you like too much to have a hole in... Remember the original compleat idiot's guide - about the VW beetle? The story about the ponytail? CARS CAN BE DANGEROUS. They want to lock down the ECU, fine. Just leave the rest of it to anyone brave and sober enough to turn a wrench and think straight.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Way to much money in aftermarket parts / upgrades.
Stallman was right. Although in his story, it was about books, not babies or cars.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
Nuts.
What are they talking about? The last time I heard a "hobbyist" repairing a car must have been 20 years ago. Modern cars are way too complex too repair or modify at home or even by a professional without a fully equipped garage. I doubt that the small number of people who can actually pull this off poses a problem to the car industry. Conclusion: they have other motives.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My freedom. My right to do whatever the f*ck I want, with me and what's mine, is, and always has been, "too complex and dangerous" to handle, be it by a private company, lobby group, or even a government. My right to be human is not a commodity you can meddle with. It just happens to collide with your business model, and to that I suggest you change it, instead of changing me.
This isn't just about lock-in. Car manufacturers have a huge risk in the form of damage to the brand if something happens. Unfortunately with the way our media works these days, the outrage and damage occurs first, and only later do we find out if it was justified.
No company wants their brand to be the one involved in a sudden news story where they become the punching bag (justified or not), it's extremely costly.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
We have two choices: we can be free, or we can be safe. These are mutually exclusive. And in the United States of America, the only correct choice is to be free.
False dilemma. Those are not mutually exclusive and you are ludicrously over-simplifying reality. There is a spectrum between freedom and safety and we have to decide where on that spectrum to be. Complete freedom and perfect safety are both impossible ideals that are incompatible with a civilized society not to mention the laws of physics.
Since I'm not buying it I shouldn't be taxed on it, but aren't we taxed on the phones even though they're leased?
Taxes can be assessed on purchases as well as leases. There is nothing sacred about a lease from a taxation standpoint. Your government can tax pretty much whatever they want to. Furthermore you almost certainly are not leasing your phone. You are buying it on an installment plan in most cases. The difference may sound minor to you but I can assure you that difference is enormous both from an accounting and legal standpoint.
Although Chrysler is really an Italian company, as it is owned by Fiat.
Chrysler LLC is an American company majority owned by the Italian company Fiat S.p.A. Might sound like a trivial distinction but it is not trivial at all.
To purchase a nice car from the 60's or 70's with no computer.
I have NO interest in any car from that era. Driven plenty of them and almost all of them suck badly by today's standards. Some of them look nice enough but that's about the end of their appeal.
Easy to fix, and except for crash-readyness usually pretty solid.
Easy to fix IF you can get parts. "Solid"? Don't make me laugh. They are unreliable rust buckets for the most part with shitty fuel economy, terrible handling, and horrid interiors which are far less safe in a crash than most vehicles sold today.
I don't know, I hit someone's van with my Bronco (full size) my bumper was fine, his side had a big dent in it. It's easy to go through these crumple cars when yours doesn't.
In a high speed crash the van occupants would almost certainly have a better chance of survival than you in your Bronco. Those crumple zones aren't there because they are cheap. They demonstrably and significantly improve passenger safety. Would you rather have some crumpled sheet metal or a trip to the local ER?
I guess we can't keep using that old open source/proprietary analogy: Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?
This. Toyota doesn't want to be responsible if some third party garage or vehicle owner hacks the braking software and causes a car not to stop at a stop light resulting in a multi-car pile up.
Change the brakes, struts, suspension, transmission etc etc - fine. Hack the software to make it perform some trick? No thanks.
Take the simple example of vehicles with in-dash displays. By law if you have a DVD player manufacturers are not allowed to have the video show unless the car is in park (or maybe the engine is off?). There are guides around to modify this behaviour so that you can watch the DVD while the car is driving.
Sounds harmless enough. Suppose this has an effect on the number of fatal injuries in that particular brand of car (hypothetically speaking).
Now all of a sudden, brand X has been damaged because the stats only show that drivers of brand X vehicle are more likely to die in a car accident. There is no way to pick apart those statistics to understand that it was due to a vehicle modification.
Once you get into more critical components the effect would likely be more pronounced.
Young people are already abandoning car ownership as a value in and of itself. This kind of lawyered-up intellectual property protection will only insure that innovation will be eliminated in the automobile market - and continue to discourage personal ownership of vehicles. The Trans Pacific Partnership will help spread this pernicious model across the world, so everyone will become sheeple together.
Not even close, you jackass.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Ban Tesla sales, and require everyone to use the dealership for everything by force of law, and we will have it made!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Even for something as straightforward as getting new tyres fitted, I just pay the professionals.
Sure, it's more expensive than doing it myself. But it gets done better, and it's not sufficiently more expensive to justify the grief and hassle of doing it myself.
Of course, they don't always get it right: Last week the two new tyres I had fitted were put onto the front wheels of my car, not the rear.
I didn't even look at the wheels, just noticed there was vibration at high speed. So I took the car back to the garage today, they spotted the issue, realised they'd thrown away my otherwise good front tyres, and as a result I now have the new tyres on the rear wheels as required, and a new pair of tyres on the front wheels too at no charge.
Good customer service, and worked out far cheaper than doing my own tyres, even though I'd have replaced the right ones to start with.
If they do this, DIY cars and rebuilt junkers from the trash bin will be coming to a road near you... SOON! If one of the automakers would do a non-digital controlled car where the 'puters just monitor and report, not control, it will sell. This will allow pulling out the DCMA'ed puters by the roots. Or even better, someone does a OSS computer that doesn't use the computer or DCMA software that Detroit/Tokyo/EU/etc use and just does a wholesale 'field replacement'. With DIY & custom 3D printed cars, doing non-DCMA might be easier.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Wasn't this the ridiculous argument / car analogy that was discussed when the DMCA was initially debated?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The "industry concerns" are just horror stories from hired lawyers. That DMCA is a criminal law, and it doesn't only cover "most people", it covers everyone. And it covers many situations other than "modifying these ECUs", including normal repair/upkeep/modernization for the durable-goods item that is an automobile (or truck, or self-propelled vacation home).
Face it, manufacturers completely abandon product service after a few years, which causes aftermarket suppliers at the high end, and junkyards at the low end, to take over. When you criminalize aftermarket/junkyard operations, some manufacturer gets another new-product sale (and some owner has to abandon his vehicle for metal scrap value). So, some (not all) manufacturers might hire lawyers to argue for criminalization.
I wince whenever I hear flaky claims like "most people do not have the experience or knowledge..."; heck, most people don't have the experience or knowledge to read Slashdot. That is just arrogance, and dismissal, and is entirely unworthy.
The GNU CAR, Core Automobile for Research. http://goo.gl/vcGe1X
Move countries then.
The process to qualify for a work visa is easier said than done.
This is why volunteers have started with a Bible translation from 1901 (the ASV), updated it to use modern English, and released it to the public domain as the World English Bible.
Would you buy a computer with the hood welded shut?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The DMCA is a law for the tech sector.
As such, like much 18 year old tech, it needs to keep up with the times and lawmakers should be upgrading it to account for new things (such as things that weren't yet available in the late 90's), remove cruft that no longer applies (or shouldn't have applied) and rewritten to prevent the broad abuse that companies are able to use it for.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
The copyright act still allows you to copy your own tapes, cd's, dvd's, and material for personal use. You just can't redistribute for profit. So unless they can prove you are somehow mass producing your car, i think the courts will agree.