GM has joined with John Deere in asking the government to confirm that you literally cannot own your car because of the software in its engine.With one exception, all my cars and trucks have been Chevrolets. The only way I'd be willing to "license" a vehicle I wasn't allowed to work on myself was if you agreed to fix it for free or replace it for free, for however long the "license" lasts. Those are the terms I get when I rent a car, and they're acceptable. I'm not about to 'buy' a car from you without owning it.
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."
Reshaping Ownership
No, I don't think so, General Motors.
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12 comments:
The bailout/theft pretty much assured I will never buy a GM vehicle.
What Raven said. Had Saturns, GM killed that company, and when they wore out, we got Hondas.
So you're saying that any company who sells a product that contains proprietary software (aka, intellectual property) should be forced to allow it to be intentionally hacked or reverse engineered?
This isn't a simple issue and I haven't decided where I stand on it because frankly I'm not sure I understand it thoroughly.
When you buy a book, you don't acquire the legal right to alter the text of that book or distribute it to others.
Modifications to black box code run a high risk of malfunctioning. And I can't really see how one allows 3rd parties to troubleshoot/modify code without exposing that code (and the legally protected intellectual property therein) to both competitors and malicious actors.
Either they're operating blind - which is dangerous - or the code is exposed (which allows competitors to rip off your hard work).
This hardly sounds like a simple issue to me. And good luck finding a car with no software in it!
Did a little more thinking on this, and it seems you're conflating ownership of tangible personal property (the physical tractor you can see with your eyes) with ownership of intangible property (the software that runs the tractor, which you can't see).
The tractor, like your car, is a hybrid. And there are different types of ownership rights even in land (mineral rights, for instance, don't allow you to build a house on the property: they're a restricted form of ownership). Generally, software ownership rights are nothing like ownership rights for tangible property because they are fundamentally different goods:
What happens when you purchase a specific software application? And if you’ve purchased software, what is the license agreement for? Do you now own the software because you paid for it?*
Simply put, no. Though you may have paid for the software, what you have actually done is licensed the application, essentially paying for the rights to use the software according to guidelines determined by the owner. The owner of the software remains the person or entity that holds the copyright, giving them the sole legal authority power to sell, distribute, copy and/or change the content of the software. And unless the person or organization transfers ownership rights, the rights remain with the owner no matter how many times the owner legally distributes the software.
Looked at this way, is this going to "change the nature of property ownership? It's not at all clear to me that it does. Seems more like a continuation of current ownership law wrt to software.
But again, I've not spent much time researching this and reserve the right to declare myself all wet later on :p
Does a manufacturer have a legal right to sell a product under express conditions (such as, "my product can only be serviced by approved vendors or all warranties are null and void")? Sure.
And consumers can choose not to buy products under those terms. You might argue back, "But that's too hard/too expensive!" (you have made this argument before)
I maintain that a sale represents a willing exchange between seller and buyer and further, that the buyer has no absolute right to buy from any seller on his/her own terms. He cannot, for instance, demand to buy at a price lower than the seller is willing to accept, or demand to buy and use the product for a purpose morally abhorrent to the seller (the no-gay-wedding bakers' argument).
Are you arguing that the buyer has a legal right to unilaterally assert some "buying right" that ignores the terms under which the seller is willing to do business?
Or are you just saying, "I would not wish to buy under these terms" (but others ought to be free to)?
What I said was neither of those things.
I'm saying I won't buy a car I can't repair myself, unless you promise as part of the condition of sale to repair it for free. It's a proposition: what's really being offered isn't a sale but a lease, except they're using the term "sale."
A third alternative that would be acceptable: separate the sale of the car from the license for the software, and let me purchase alternate software that will work on it. This is the sort of IBM v. Apple dispute: I've always thought Apple's terms were unacceptable, so I've never purchased an Apple product of any kind.
You know, my grandfather was a welder who ran a service station for long-haul truckers in Tennessee much of his life. He taught my father to work on engines, and my father taught me, and I've passed on the lessons as well. It offers a lot of freedom, being able to fix things yourself -- go to a junkyard, strip the pieces, install them appropriately, get the engine running right. It's a sort of making that fits in with the world of machines in which we live. It's a kind of independence I value, as well as a family tradition. And, in addition, it's fun to customize machines by building them out in different ways.
So I probably wouldn't buy a car I'm not allowed to maintain even if there were a "we'll fix it for free every time" option, as there usually is on a lease. But at least such an option would be reasonably in line with other sorts of leasing of equipment, which is what they're really proposing.
I might well buy a vehicle where software was unlocked, and I could pull in the kind I like best. I've done that sort of tinkering with computers for decades, both hardware and software.
But if GM thinks I'm going to buy a car, assume the costs of fixing it, and also agree that no one but them can fix it and they can therefore charge monopoly rates for service -- no way am I buying off on that.
Grim, for some reason this came to mind after your post above-
"Him an' my uncle tore that engine down"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvaEJzoaYZk&list=RDXnuSaKVvUgE&index=15
I know the song. :)
When you buy a book, you don't acquire the legal right to alter the text of that book or distribute it to others.
But of course you do, Cass. You can alter the text of the book in whatever way you prefer. You can highlight, underline, cut out pages, write marginal notes, translate it, read it silently or out loud... you can do anything with the text that doesn't involve making copies and distributing the copies to others. (That being the right reserved to the copyright holder - the right to copy.)
And you can do anything at all to the physical book itself: modify it in any way, use it for some purpose other than reading, lend it, repair it, resell it, destroy it.
Are you arguing that the buyer has a legal right to unilaterally assert some "buying right" that ignores the terms under which the seller is willing to do business?
Yes. The First Sale Doctrine guarantees this right in general commerce: selling an object renders any rights the seller had extinct, and the buyer can thereafter do whatever they want with the thing.
(Of course, it's possible to exchange money for contract rights. You could contract with a museum, say, to hand over a sculpture on condition that the museum display it in such-and-such a way, and if they no longer want to display it, it comes back to you, in exchange for a payment to you. But we don't normally call such a transaction a "sale". "Sale" means that ownership passes from the seller to the buyer.)
...The First Sale Doctrine guarantees this right in general commerce: selling an object renders any rights the seller had extinct, and the buyer can thereafter do whatever they want with the thing.
That's *after* the sale has taken place. We're talking about dictating the terms of the sale itself: for instance, telling a seller that he/she can't sell a product with a warranty that is only valid so long as the buyer doesn't alter the product (IOW, the warranty is on the product "as sold" and "so long as it is maintain in a manner consistent with the seller's terms").
On the first excerpt above, the reference wasn't to the physical book but to the intellectual property rights. I don't have the right to alter the text of a book and pass it off as the author's work. This is actually quite comparable to altering the software inside a vehicle: such an alteration would not be in any way obvious to third parties.
Which could be important if large numbers of people started altering Ford s/w so Fords all belched black smoke or began running amok and causing accidents. A 3rd party alteration to software running an automobile could easily be hacked, leading to all sorts of problems.
...The First Sale Doctrine guarantees this right in general commerce: selling an object renders any rights the seller had extinct, and the buyer can thereafter do whatever they want with the thing.
Sure be nice if this applied to the medical field- keep drug price down a few orders of magnitude.
When I was in High School, the school fundraiser required us to pay in advance for all the candy bars we were required to take and try to sell. I figured that since I had paid for them, I owned them, and I could sell them for whatever I wanted. So I started selling mine for $2 instead of $1.
My mother, who bought several to use as snacks for one of her parties, did not agree with my understanding of business ethics once the full facts of the transaction became clear.
That's *after* the sale has taken place. We're talking about dictating the terms of the sale itself: for instance, telling a seller that he/she can't sell a product with a warranty that is only valid so long as the buyer doesn't alter the product (IOW, the warranty is on the product "as sold" and "so long as it is maintain in a manner consistent with the seller's terms").
Actually, Cass... that's precisely what John Deere and GM are arguing in court about vehicles they've already sold. That yes, they sold Snuffy Smith that tractor, but they only LICENSED the software that runs the engine... AFTER the sale. I'm pretty willing to bet there's no terms on the title of the tractor that says they still own the software in the engine, they're merely asserting that right after the fact.
Apple tried (and lost) the same argument with the FCC in claiming that their iPhones were sold, but the iOS that they installed on the phones was licensed, so that if a iPhone owner wanted to jailbreak (a fancy term for "replace the operating system of") their iPhone, then Apple had a perfect right to "brick" the phone, rendering it inoperable. No one claimed the users had a right to the source code of the iOS device, nor a right to copy and sell the operating system. Merely that they had the right to replace the operating system of the phone with something else of their own choosing. The FCC ruled against Apple on that one (and I believe rightfully so). I also believe that John Deere and GM should lose their case. No one is asking for rights to view, copy, or resell the software written to control fuel injection, or cylinder timing on an engine; they're asking to replace it with other software so that alternate (non-GM/Deere) parts can be used. This is fully compatible with the First Sale Doctrine.
The biggest problem with the DMCA is that the assumption on the government's part is that users are buying software (as in owning it) and the programmers who wrote the software are merely trying to ensure their copyrights are intact. But in reality, the software manufacturers are attempting to claim something never done before in the history of the world, that by "buying" their software you don't actually own it, thus you are forbidden from reselling, or modifying it for your own use. If I buy a copy of Moby Dick from a used book store, I am fully within my rights to resell that book when I am done with it, and no copyright infringement occurs. But if I buy a electronic copy of Moby Dick for my eReader, the claim is made that I am merely licensing that book, and cannot ever sell it. Now, most vendors of eBooks are very clear in their terms and conditions about this. You DO NOT own the book, you're merely buying a license to read it. And it's (one reason) that eBooks are so much cheaper than physical books (the major reason they're cheaper is the lack of physical construction, warehousing, and all the other incidentals that come from making and selling a physical object). But there have been occasions where this process has been abused. Barnes and Noble "sold" (leased is more accurate) a book that they later determined they had no right to sell, so without informing their customers ahead of time, remotely removed it from their customers' devices without so much as a by your leave. Then they tried to hide behind that "we only licensed it to you". A court slapped them down for that one. The proper response would have been to give the profits of the illicit sale to the rightful vendor of the book, but they tried to avoid that through dubious means. It's certainly an interesting time we live in.
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