"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.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."GM’s claim is all about copyright and software code, and it’s the same claim John Deere is making about their tractors. The TL;DR version of the argument goes something like this:
Cars work because software tells all the parts how to operate
The software that tells all the parts to operate is customized code
That code is subject to copyright
GM owns the copyright on that code and that software
A modern car cannot run without that software; it is integral to all systems
Therefore, the purchase or use of that car is a licensing agreement
And since it is subject to a licensing agreement, GM is the owner and can allow/disallow certain uses or access.
I am very interested to see how this plays out. I hope the government shoots it down but I can see both sides of things. It would make a 10 year old GM way to expensive for someone in the hood to own if they had to go to the dealer for service. I am not sure how that would reflect on resale values.
Might make for a very interesting aftermarket PCM replacement program.
One of the reasons they’re doing this is at some point in the neat future they’re going to deploy vehicle to vehcile communications and they’re kinda worried about people hacking it and fucking around.
I love GM cars but this is a fucked up point of view. I hope they get their asses handed to them. Once you own something you should be free to modify it as you please. If they want to cut off modified vehicles from P2P communication oveir their network the way a modded Xbox gets banned, fine. But to challenge the legality of doing it? No.
What would stop you from purchasing an additional computer, and reflashing the additional computer with your own software tweak. Then swapping the computers out so your own car is running on your own tweaked version of software?
I mean there will always be stand alone systems like AEM, Haltech, Motec etc who will have programmable ecus to make everything work. They don’t pass obd plug ins but a simple swap of the ECU does wonders
…but you can get killed by a minor fender bender when your airbag goes off like a claymore mine…or maybe you ignition fails…but yeah it’s those software modifications we need to worry about