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Three States Propose DMCA-Countering 'Right To Repair' Laws (ifixit.org)
Automakers are using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to shut down tools used by car mechanics -- but three states are trying to stop them.
An anonymous reader quotes IFixIt.Org:
in 2014, Ford sued Autel for making a tool that diagnoses car trouble and tells you what part fixes it. Autel decrypted a list of Ford car parts, which wound up in their diagnostic tool. Ford claimed that the parts list was protected under copyright (even though data isn't creative work) -- and cracking the encryption violated the DMCA. The case is still making its way through the courts. But this much is clear: Ford didn't like Autel's competing tool, and they don't mind wielding the DMCA to shut the company down...
Thankfully, voters are stepping up to protect American jobs. Just last week, at the behest of constituents, three states -- Nebraska, Minnesota, and New York -- introduced Right to Repair legislation (more states will follow). These 'Fair Repair' laws would require manufacturers to provide service information and sell repair parts to owners and independent repair shops.
Activist groups like the EFF and Repair.org want to "ensure that repair people aren't marked as criminals under the DMCA," according to the site, arguing that we're heading towards a future with many more gadgets to fix. "But we'll have to fix copyright law first."
Thankfully, voters are stepping up to protect American jobs. Just last week, at the behest of constituents, three states -- Nebraska, Minnesota, and New York -- introduced Right to Repair legislation (more states will follow). These 'Fair Repair' laws would require manufacturers to provide service information and sell repair parts to owners and independent repair shops.
Activist groups like the EFF and Repair.org want to "ensure that repair people aren't marked as criminals under the DMCA," according to the site, arguing that we're heading towards a future with many more gadgets to fix. "But we'll have to fix copyright law first."
Appears to be states using their rights to do something that makes sense, nothing at the federal level.
So I can only assume the GOP is going to smack them down on it somehow.
i have a 1999 Ford Expedition, great truck for the 2-3k I drive it a year. Had a cracked windshield replaced which leaked (they fixed it) but it got my Gem Module(General Electronics Module) and fuse box wet. Darn truck, kept draining the battery, most of the electric stuff did not work, no lights, flashers, turn signals, dash indicators, windows ;) lol, !. Got it to the dealer. They said my GEM Module was bad, and they would order one.
;)
It would be 700.00 dollars up front and they had no idea when it would arrive. In fact they had one customer that has been waiting 7 months.
OK so I talk about getting one from the junk yard. But!!!! it needs to be programmed with the exact options my truck has and only Ford can do that and that is 500.00
I went home and just charged the battery everytime I wanted to drive the truck. And over time things dried out. All is good now.
I have been gathering every scrap of info so I can build a jig and write a program to dump the firmware from my electronic modules on my truck, since I am keeping it forever
I used to work at Dialogic, which was then bought by Intel. In all my time there, new prospects/customers would invariably say: "This is really hard to configure (we had line resource cards, DSP resource cards, and various ways to map these resources together.) don't you guys have a card configuration utility?" Well, for Windows, yes. For Linux, no. "Too hard and no demand" says Engineering. So, taking the bull by the horns, I found the PCI ID codes for the various cards, wrote a utility to configure them, got approval from my manager to release it as open-source and all was well. Until...The head of Engineering at our division found out about it and lodged a formal internal complaint that I had "released Intel proprietary information" and was summoned to Parsippany to face legal. Fortunately, my manager's support and basic common sense prevailed, the Eng manager was sent packing with his tail between his legs and I flew home drunk as a skunk. The legal guy basically said: "when you expose a PCI ID to the OS, it's no longer proprietary - dumbass!". Point is that when information is documented and exposed in any way, it is not "proprietary" in the sense that it cannot be used, just not stolen and used inappropriately.
Federal laws automatically override all state laws. So these laws will have no effect.
I mean, I'm aware the DMCA is awful. They should just do something about that.
It'd be nice if it were that easy, but the controversal parts of the DMCA are implementations of two treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory. The U.S. would have to revoke the treaty in order to remove the offending parts of the DMCA. To those that say it's the Republicans' fault that we have this law, please note that the DMCA was signed by a Democratic president and passed in the Senate unanimously - all 45 Democratic senators wanted this.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
>To those that say it's the Republicans' fault that we have this law, please note that the DMCA was signed by a Democratic president and passed in the Senate unanimously - all 45 Democratic senators wanted this.
Yeah, but those were the years when the DINOs ran the democrat party with their center-right "suck up to the liberals a little in the primaries then ignore them for 8 years" style of governance...
Those years are well and truly over, Bernie Sanders and Trump both pretty much shattered that consensus.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I specifically left Ford for motorsport vehicles (Cobra, GT500) and went over to Mitsubishi (Evolution IX, Evolution X) for this reason. Tired of having to pay for $1000+ tuning software just to be able to write the tunes myself, when a crash or new build happens the ECU ID changes and the software locks you out again.
Where as on the Evo I literally had to buy a $120 cable and I can tune an unlimited number of cars with full control over ever parameter and essentially a fully professional environment to write custom tunes and even sell them if needed. We're not talking about end-user "hit apply" type tunes, I'm talking about changing individual load cells on hundreds of maps over months to dial in an exact tune.
Besides that the car was built so much better I felt like an idiot for parading the domestic brands for so long. I literally traded a 32 valve V8 Cobra for an Evolution IX that had a four wheel drive turbo 2.0 liter 4 cylinder which pulled *harder* and was easier to get serious horsepower out of. My jaw literally dropped on the test drive of a modded 450whp Evo9. I had driven supercharged 500-700hp V8's but this little car never broke traction and made it's power lower in the RPM range which made it feel many times faster. Plus you could floor it around corners and it was just unbelievable how well it gained traction as boost kicked in around a corner.
I never went back and almost nothing is locked down on these cars. Stop wasting your time with other brands... *Edit* Captcha was "inducer".
I still buy CDs and it's been 13 years since I saw one which was alleged to contain a technological measure intended to limit access. Out of my approx 2000 CDs, literally exactly one of them has such a thing (which I didn't realize at the time I bought it). (And then I also didn't realize until after I ripped it and later found out that some people's drives (and car players) were having trouble with it.)
If you make a CD player which can play 99.95% (1/2000) and fails on one, it will not only be perfectly legal, but people will be ok that it doesn't play the one broken CD. (They can just go pirate it, instead of buying it, if they want to hear the album.)
DRM simply isn't a factor in the music sales. It effectively doesn't exist, except maybe in some of those streaming services. Video is where you go to find DRM, which is why I eventually gave up and started just pirating all my movies and TV, whereas I still buy music. Music publishers still want your money; it's the video people who are constantly creating piracy incentives.