Copyright issues and car repair
Some bad news from
TechDirt:
How Automakers Abuse Intellectual Property Laws To Force You To Pay More For Repairs
Back in May, we wrote about the effort to get a Right to Repair bill passed for automobiles.
So far, thanks in part to lobbying by automakers, that bill hasn't gone very far. Reader MR sends in this article exploring both the bill and how automakers have been abusing intellectual property law to force you to pay more. Basically, as cars become more sophisticated and computerized, automakers are locking up access to those computers, and claiming that access is protected by copyrights. Mechanics are told they can only access the necessary diagnostics if they pay huge sums -- meaning that many mechanics simply can't repair certain cars, and car owners are forced to go to dealers, who charge significantly higher fees.
There is no legitimate basis for this at all. It's a clear misuse of intellectual property laws -- which were never designed for this sort of thing -- to prevent independent auto mechanics from repairing newer cars. But it's the end result of the increasing creep of intellectual property rights, and the growing computerization of everything. It allows manufacturers to extend "IP" rights to physical goods, and create all sorts of new monopolies. In a perfect world, this wouldn't need a separate law. It would be a clear violation of antitrust laws. But, we don't live in a perfect world, and for the time being you're probably paying a lot more money to repair your car because of it.
It will be interesting to see if designs like
Microsquirt and
Megasquirt start taking off. You get ten thousand of a specific vehicle out there, someone is going to start hacking it and publishing the results. My sister-in-law's husband is working with the Megasquirt system and is having a lot of fun -- it works very very well...
Posted by DaveH at January 3, 2010 12:23 PM