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: 2) by mhajicek on Friday April 24 2015, @11:22AM
Wasn't there recently a ruling that the consumer has the right to jailbreak their phone? Wouldn't that also apply here?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by monster on Friday April 24 2015, @03:46PM
It was an exemption given by the Librarian of Congress [wikipedia.org]. As such, it's given case by case and not on a general basis. The exemption you point to, for example, was given only to iPhones and doesn't cover Android handsets with locked boot, even if they look like an almost equal case. Same here, it would need a new, different exemption.
It's just a very imperfect solution for a really bad law.