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Wired has an article which responds to the view of John Deere and General Motors on what the people who buy their vehicles actually own, which was expressed during comments on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):
John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.
Several manufacturers recently submitted similar comments to the Copyright Office under an inquiry into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
...
General Motors told the Copyright Office that proponents of copyright reform mistakenly “conflate ownership of a vehicle with ownership of the underlying computer software in a vehicle.” But I’d bet most Americans make the same conflation—and Joe Sixpack might be surprised to learn GM owns a giant chunk of the Chevy sitting in his driveway
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday April 24 2015, @05:39AM
If we want to fight this madness we need to attack it at the root. Go read some Stallman and realize the idiocy of 'Intellectual Property.'
We need to start the fight on the idea copyright gives the author 'ownership.' In the U.S. the -only- justification can be found in the U.S. Constitution where it says "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." And that is all.
To promote progress we require patents to be published so that other may build upon them. At the time the clause was written it was simply taken as a given that the same situation existed for copyright. We need to press to formalize this assumption. No copyright should be valid on a binary other than as a derived work. Every copyrighted piece of software should be required to be delivered as buildable source and that the physical embodyment permit modification by the end user under clearly defined rules.
Note what I am not saying. I'm not calling for mandating Free Software or even Open Source. Rights holders should, if they want, be permitted to exercise the exclusive rights granted under copyright which restrict selling copies, public performance and in the case of software even of installing more working copies than licensed. However every user should have the right to read the Source, learn from it in exactly the same way they can study and learn from a book. They should be able to modify their copy for their own use and even sell that service or the actual modifications in the form of patches requiring the original copyrighted work. Signed binaries should be legal only under strict limits. For example a secure endpoint could require signed binaries but it should also be possible to blow the original keys and replace them if an owner wants to repurpose the hardware. A vehicle owner should certainly be permitted to install modified software but only after some sort of unlock process which would forever mark the equipment as modified and outside of all warranty since it is fairly easy to destroy a modern engine with bad firmware. Only an end owner should have the right to lock the hardware for anti-theft purposes.
Copyright should not be usable to convert what would otherwise be an outright sale of tangible property into a lease.
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Friday April 24 2015, @06:16AM
Its not like there are are mo alternative sources. You can find replacement software for most cars from the performance industry. Just google engine performance chips. Dozens of companies.
Get behind the The Right to Repair Movement [wikipedia.org], and get it passed in your state.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @07:16AM
Except if the car etc manufacturers get DMCA protection, then those performance chips become illegal, because they can just add some pretty trivial "protection" and if you "decrypt it", you've broken the law, and your new chip/software is illegal. So no alternative sources anymore.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 24 2015, @01:46PM
In many cases these performance chips are totally new developments from the ground up and use nothing of the original.
In other cases, they simply intercept or replace can-bus instructions in the vehicle's data stream.
I suspect this isn't so much about any secrets in the software. Its more about driverless car manufacturers making sure no one can tinker with their produces when they finally start producing them. The next tactic will be to demonize car hacking and blame all sorts of deaths on it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @06:27PM
Yes the aftermarket stuff is their own, new stuff yes, but even if there is one part using "encrypted" communication with the ECU, you are fubared, because hacking that encrypted connection is protected, so even if you replace the ECU, you need to replace all the parts that use that "encrypted" communication with it. So through enough "encrypted" shite around and it's very much unfeasible to do any changes, since you need to replace all of it.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday April 24 2015, @11:20AM
Those "chips" aren't replacements. They're just a resistor to fool a sensor.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by broggyr on Friday April 24 2015, @01:33PM
Some "chips" are in fact a resistor. Some are not.
Taking things out of context since 1972.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday April 24 2015, @04:36PM
Do any actually fully replace the computer?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday April 24 2015, @07:24AM
Attack it at the root? Go read Karl Marx. Yes, you have heard of him. But have you ever actually read him? The opening of "Das Kapital" is a masterful critique of the idea that commodities have any intrinsic value. Of course they do not, it is only speculation, or actual need, or the cost of production that gives value to a commodity. Of course, property and commodities are not the same things. Commodities are exchangable properties, where actual properties cannot be sold or bought, only given as a gift or lost by means of a market. Is this really a debate that Soylent news wants to get into at this point? We have a lot of libertarian property fanatics here who have no idea what property actually is, and it will take a very long time to educate them. I suggest we let sleeping libertarians lie. At least until Rand Paul self-destructs on the campaign trail. \
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Friday April 24 2015, @07:41AM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aristarchus on Friday April 24 2015, @08:16AM
The weasel word here is "educate". With which you say that difference in opinion is entirely due to lack of education.
Not a weasel word, a fact. You are wise to not disagree with . . . facts.
Property is one of those things that everyone thinks they know what it is, but the more we try to analyze and specify, the more amorphous the concept becomes. And the point with Marx is that the idea of property radically shifts under capitalism to things that were not even property prior, and posits alienation of property that did not exist previously. Real Estate was just that under Feudal economics, an estate, and land could not be sold or bought. Ever notice there were no Century 21 Gold Blazers in the Middle Ages? So, yes, to affirm my original point, which you were so bright as to pick up on, confusions over property are the result of a lack of education. That and the Digitial Millennial Copyright Act. We don't "have you," babe, anymore.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Friday April 24 2015, @07:46AM
Also read Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant....
Nice "summary" here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/ [stanford.edu]
Tl;dr: no one has ever agreed on definitions.
Anyone spending time arguing anywhere knows, debating with undefined definitions is ... meaningless.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @01:43PM
My ex-wife was a Marxist, and the best she could ever do to explain it was
1) Revolution
2) ???
3) Utopia
Where "???" seemed to me to be some sort of miraculous fundamental change in human nature.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Friday April 24 2015, @06:57PM
some sort of miraculous fundamental change in human nature.
This is neither the time nor the place to engage in commie bashing or Red-baiting, but let me remind you of my point. "Property" is not a simple transparent concept, and Marx's point is that it is a social construction dependent upon the mode and relations of production in society. This is not a theory of a purfect utopia, it is a critique of capitalism. Capitalism changed what property is and what it does, and in so doing it has changed human nature. This happened mostly by the capitalization of knowledge, what some here might call "tech". And of course, human nature and modes of production are not likely to stop evolving anytime soon, as much as some may try to use the legal regime to freeze their temporary personal advantage in place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @09:08PM
When violence and force is used to select leaders, >90% of the time those capable of the most violence and force rise to the top.
And when they do, most of them continue to stick around long past their welcome- after all they have the most violence and force, and have beaten all others.
No surprise the popular implementation plan for Communism and other violent revolutions usually result in Dictatorships.
From what I see in the American Revolution was more of a secession than a revolution most of those at the top in the USA (yes I know it wasn't the USA back then but you know what I mean ;) ) still stayed in power in the USA, it's just they stopped reporting/paying to the British. Whereas the French and Chinese revolutions they got rid of a lot of those at the top in their countries - and got dictatorships for their efforts.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday April 24 2015, @09:31PM
It's the words, isn't it? The M -word and the C-word? Makes it impossible to stay on topic and have a discussion. Oh well. You know what else Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels advocated? A Central Bank! (right there in the https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ [marxists.org] Communist Manifesto)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @02:11PM
This thread is an interesting discussion. Usually, on Slashdot, it's "Of course government has to protect American jobs and private property, if you don't support that you must be a COMMUNIST." And in the next breath, "Copyright and intellectual property are imaginary concepts, enforced by big businesses backed by FASCIST governments". Guessing these are mostly upper middle class males in their 20's, with lots of electronic gadgets lying around, along with hard disks and SSDs stuffed with torrented music files, games, movies, commercial apps, textbooks, and what-have-you.
It's wishful thinking for them to suppose that this lazy mob of rich kids has any influence at all on public policy.
OP and GP are among the first to point out that there's really no difference between the philosophy underlying the concept of private property and intellectual property. Why Capitalism? Because we need to reward the creators of wealth that contributes products and services that benefit the community. Why intellectual property? Because someone spent a substantial amount of time creating something that many others feel is worthwhile to consume. If you don't reward creators, then over time you're going to get less and less superior work.
Who decides products and works are beneficial to the community, and to what extent they should be rewarded? The marketplace. Capitalism lets the marketplace decide, unless the creators or owners decide to release their product for free. Governments are charged with enforcing the laws giving owners the right to collect money for their product or work. Consumers have the right not to buy it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @07:21PM
our current system has little to do with the idealized capitalism that lets "the marketplace" decide. There are too many factors, like advertising and subsidies, that can lead to marketplace contusion.