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GM claims you don't own your car because of copyright issues


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Here's the article:

http://boingboing.net/2015/05/21/gm-says-you-dont-own-your-ca.html

From the article:

Like Deere, GM wants to stop the Copyright Office from granting an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would allow you to jailbreak the code in your car's engine so that you can take it to a non-GM mechanic for service, or fix it yourself. By controlling who can service your car, GM can force you to buy only official, expensive parts, protecting its bottom line.

As Consumerist quips, GM wants you to know that the car in the driveway is "literally not your father's Oldsmobile."

Generally speaking I defend copyright. I want artists to be able to make a living from their pens or their music. This is too far. When I have the title to a piece of personal property, like an automobile, it is mine the Manufactuerer should not be able to tell me where I must take my car to have it serviced. This is too far.

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This is not going to end well for them. People understand the concept of physical property like cars a lot better than they do intellectual property. And people have owned cars for far longer than they've owned digital music. Also, there's an absolutely massive, long-established industry (car-related transactions are something like 10% of US GDP; though that does include the manufacturers) based around the idea that once you buy a car you can do what you want with it.


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Shit like this was always an inevitable consequence of the direction that intellectual property has been going over the last two decades anyway. It had already gone too far well before it got to this point, but yes this is ridiculous. It needs significant reform that isn't going to happen. Part of the problem is the only people qualified to properly write the reforms are those making an absolute killing out of the litigation going on around intellectual property.


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Here's the article:

http://boingboing.net/2015/05/21/gm-says-you-dont-own-your-ca.html

From the article:

Generally speaking I defend copyright. I want artists to be able to make a living from their pens or their music. This is too far. When I have the title to a piece of personal property, like an automobile, it is mine the Manufactuerer should not be able to tell me where I must take my car to have it serviced. This is too far.

What's even funnier is that GM only exists today because taxpayers were forced by the government to bail them out, If you own a GM car and are a taxpayer you've been f.cked both ways.

Howver I'm interested in how you'd defend the modern application IP? It's mutated from a system that grants short term patent rights for original inventions to an over arching legal scam that supresses competition for multinationals.

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This is bullshit. Why would I take my car for maintenance at a dealer who is actively trying to fuck me over? Why would I pay for over-priced parts? Lower quality mechanics? What a joke. I will continue to fix my own truck, and I'm sure that whatever security protection that they install will be quickly beaten by the collective knowledge of the entire world.


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How is this worse than DRM on digital content or HP suing companies for making cheap inkjet cartidges for their printers?

I'm guessing that more people view cars as a neccesity and therefore law shouldn't apply to them. Also why you probably won't hear the "stealing" label being thrown around in regards to this like you do when it's about digital piracy.

That and taking a car to the dealership for repair is ridiculously expensive compared to a regular mechanic shop.

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Fez nailed it. Ignorance about software simply won't translate to automobile ownership. Americans love their cars. They may not know intellectual property from an apple, but they know that plopping down 20 to 60 thousand dollars for a car means they own that goddamned car.

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How is this worse than DRM on digital content or HP suing companies for making cheap inkjet cartidges for their printers?

It's different in that Deer and GM are seeking to stop owners of the actual physical product they've bought from accessing their own friggin property. In the cases you mention (which I agree are bullshit) the companies are looking to stop copying of their material, they weren't trying to stop someone from accessing the data on the product they'd already sold. To service a modern car or truck you need to be able to access the EMS, which these companies now reckon gives them a captive market they can screw over, Best thing would be to allow competition to teach them a lesson, who is going to buy a car from GM or a tractor from JD when it's possible they'll be locked into a non voluntary contract to have their machines serviced, repaired and re-supplied by proprietory suppliers at many times the cost? Take away don't buy shit from companies that try this.

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I dont know that this will stop a lot of people from buying a GM car. A lot of people buy a prepaid service plan when purchasing a new vehicle, and the fact that they cant service the vehicle anywhere other than a GM certified service facility wont matter to those people.


I do think it will affect the resale value of a GM vehicle though


I also think that once GM makes this move, that other manufacturers will follow suit. Soon, you wont be able to have a new vehicle serviced anywhere other than that manufacturer's certified service facility


If your local mechanic wants to work on a specific type of vehicle, they will be forced to pay those manufacturers for the right to service those vehicles


We will all be paying more to service our vehicles


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scot--

is the argument that the contract of sale from dealer to end user structures the sale so that GM did not alienate the right to service the vehicle wherever end user wants, but rather, for certain valuable consideration paid by GM, end user agrees to service vehicle at GM mechanics? if so, is that an impermissible tying arrangment under the sherman act?

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I think this is ridiculous, but I think it will itself out. If you buy a GM car and now have to figure on spending about 100% more on repairs and service than normal, less people will buy there cars.



Plus you know there's going to be a huge market for people that figure out how to work around the computer and do shit on their own. On top of that , there are so many used vehicles in this country that buying a new car isn't really a necessity. I'm sure it's nice to have one, but there are so many other options.



But yeah, on principle I think this is insane in so many ways. They have to know that this is going to hurt sales. But hey, if you can make the same amount of money by producing and doing less, more power to you?


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It seems to me that the issue is the attempt to extend their copyright on the software in the car to the car itself.



Which seems to me basically like saying that the people who own the decoding software for Blu-Rays also own the physical components of your Blu-Ray player.



Which is kinda bullshit.


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Banks could end this really quickly by saying that they think this would cloud the marketability of the title on the vehicle and thus they can't finance GM cars.

How would it cloud the title?

Unless I'm reading this wrong, despite the hyperbolic headline, they are not disputing that you own the car. Just that the software is proprietary.

I think it's dumb and I hope they fail, but I don't think there is really an issue of actual ownership of the car, is there?

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