Slashdot Mirror
EU Ruling: Self-Driving Car Data Will Be Copyrighted By the Manufacturer (boingboing.net)
Yesterday, at a routine vote on regulations for self-driving cars, members of the European Peoples' Party voted down a clause that would protect a vehicle's telemetry so that it couldn't become someone's property. The clause affirmed that "data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on data-bases inapplicable." Boing Boing reports: This is data that we will need to evaluate the safety of autonomous vehicles, to fine-tune their performance, to ensure that they are working as the manufacturer claims -- data that will not be public domain (as copyright law dictates), but will instead be someone's exclusive purview, to release or withhold as they see fit. Who will own this data? It's unlikely that it will be the owners of the vehicles.
It's already the case that most auto manufacturers use license agreements and DRM to lock up your car so that you can't fix it yourself or take it to an independent service center. The aggregated data from millions of self-driving cars across the EU aren't just useful to public safety analysts, consumer rights advocates, security researchers and reviewers (who would benefit from this data living in the public domain) -- it is also a potential gold-mine for car manufacturers who could sell it to insurers, market researchers and other deep-pocketed corporate interests who can profit by hiding that data from the public who generate it and who must share their cities and streets with high-speed killer robots.
It's already the case that most auto manufacturers use license agreements and DRM to lock up your car so that you can't fix it yourself or take it to an independent service center. The aggregated data from millions of self-driving cars across the EU aren't just useful to public safety analysts, consumer rights advocates, security researchers and reviewers (who would benefit from this data living in the public domain) -- it is also a potential gold-mine for car manufacturers who could sell it to insurers, market researchers and other deep-pocketed corporate interests who can profit by hiding that data from the public who generate it and who must share their cities and streets with high-speed killer robots.
IANAL, but I've done some research on database copyright law in the EU. So, in the EU, databases (which aren't necessarily data kept in a DBMS, but just collections of data) are not copyrightable except in case of 'sui generis' databases, which are copyrightable 'if they constitute intellectual creation by virtue of the selection or arrangement of their contents.' The conditions a database needs to meet in order to constitute intellectual creation have always been a little unclear to me.
Anyway, whoever wrote the struck-down clause was trying to affirm that these data do not qualify as sui generis, and therefore cannot be copyrighted. But just because the clause was removed doesn't make it obvious that the data do qualify as sui generis and therefore are eligible for copyright. I suspect it kicks the question down the road to some kind of court proceedings. But that's just a guess; it'll be interesting to see what happens.
The clause which was removed disallowed copyright on telemetry data, but removing it does not give that copyright to the manufacturer. This does leave room for a law which gives a non-transferable copyright to the driver of the car.
This is unlikely, the party which voted to remove this clause seems to be firmly in the pocket of business interests, but it's not fair to say that they've sold everyone out just yet.
Oh good lord.
1: When the company sells the car to you, why should the data the car generates remain their property?
2: What market? Auto manufacture and sale is one of the most heavily regulated industries almost everywhere.
3: Where you reading the European Constitution? Because TFA is about Europe.
4: If you were talking about the US Constitution, why would Europeans pay any mind to a 230 year old document? It has next to no bearing on the real world in 2018.
Could this be the EU's way of blocking the right to repair?
Reading the data from the car and doing repair work is an opening to counterfeiting?
Would the EU like to see only authorized companies able to use the car data?
The loss of any freedom to talk about EU car repair on the internet?
What happens when the car owner violates EU car copyright laws?
Your car needs a service.
The car company believes no car should get an unauthorized service.
You are an unfit car owner.
Your car will be placed in the custody of the car company.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
and "Intellectual Property" too while we're at it. If the ruling class is going to claim ownership of everything that's fine, but we'll tax the heck out of it so they can't use that ownership to gut the commons. Or, well, we'll let them gut the commons and go back to the gilded age. Not sure which yet.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What I really want to know is if car owners will have the right to be forgotten.
As a matter of fact, Wolfram Alpha has (or used to have) a very similar assertion - if you discovered something using Wolfram Alpha, Steven himself had to be given credit, or something along those lines. Vis.:
I am not aware of anyone having made an issue out of it either way (and the software itself is rather useless, for anything I have ever tested it for), but that's in the ballpark with TFA.
Looks like you focussed on whether the USA constitution was 230 years old or not, but missed the fact that it does not wash in Europe anyway.