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Title    In Defence of the Concept of Ownership
Date    Friday April 24 2015, @05:18AM
Author    CoolHand
Topic   
from the what's-mine-is-yours dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/04/23/1931250

tonyPick writes:

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

Also covered by Techdirt.

Links

  1. "tonyPick" - https://soylentnews.org/~tonyPick/
  2. "John Deere and General Motors on what the people who buy their vehicles actually own" - http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
  3. "Also covered by Techdirt" - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150421/23581430744/gm-says-that-while-you-may-own-your-car-it-owns-software-it-thanks-to-copyright.shtml

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