Going outside on a warm Saturday afternoon and working on your car is as American as apple pie, for now at least.
The Auto Alliance, a special interest group representing 12 big automobile companies from Ford to Toyota, is pushing an interpretation of a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that would put this do-it-yourself tradition in danger.
These 12 car companies are lobbying hard to make working on the electrical and computer components of your own car illegal. General Motors has 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.”
General Motors also says that your car qualifies as a “mobile computing device.” Tinkering with it, therefore, could be a copyright violation because although you do own your car, you do not own the computer code inside it...
John Deere goes even further, making the case that you don’t actually own the tractor you buy. You’re just given a license to use it for an extended period of time. John Deere believes owners of tractors have “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
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