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Do You Own Your Car, Or Are You Just Allowed to Operate It?

By Tara Seals, TMCnet Contributor

You may have bought your car or tractor outright—or perhaps you made payments for five years and paid extravagant amounts of interest for the privilege. Either way, according to some companies, you still don’t actually own your car—at least, the operations part of it. And never will.

Call it software licensing gone wild. According to the corporate lawyers at John Deere and General Motors (News - Alert), because their vehicles run largely on computer code (which in turn tells the hardware parts what to do), farmers and drivers have “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

This was part of a rash of comments from the manufacturing community to the U.S. Copyright Office under an inquiry into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The Copyright Office is reviewing the Act, which, since it was written in 1998, 10 years before the iPhone (News - Alert) debuted, may no longer be entirely appropriate as an instrument for intellectual property protection. The Office will take all of the comments into account before deciding in July how to reframe the act for the digital era.

And, by extension, it will offer a guideline for which devices can be modified, hacked or repaired by their users. Including cars and farm machinery. Let’s just put it this way: “Pimp my ride” is something many manufacturers would like to see disappear from the lexicon. At least when it comes to anything beyond cosmetics.

According to Kyle Wiens, the co-founder and CEO of iFixit (News - Alert), an online repair community and parts retailer known for its open-source repair manuals and product teardowns, manufacturers for now are able to use the DCMA to support the John Deere argument that tractor purchasers are merely “operators,” not owners, because they don’t actually own the operating software.

“This is an important issue for farmers: a neighbor, Kerry Adams, hasn’t been able to fix an expensive transplanter because he doesn’t have access to the diagnostic software he needs,” Wiens explained in a column. “He’s not alone: many farmers are opting for older, computer-free equipment.”

He also explained the legal ramifications: “What does any of that have to do with copyright? Owners, tinkerers, and homebrew ‘hackers’ must copy programming so they can modify it. Product makers don’t like people messing with their stuff, so some manufacturers place digital locks over software. Breaking the lock, making the copy, and changing something could be construed as a violation of copyright law.”

In other words, in the eyes of the lawyers, those that repair their equipment on their own become pirates, and can be sued and fined.

There are plenty of justifications that companies offer for taking this tack, and many of them make sense. GM 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.” And that allowing users to access and modify the core software could lead to bad outcomes, like changing engine parameters to get around emissions regulations.

John Deere for its part said that changing its attitude on this would “make it possible for pirates, third-party developers and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software.” Presumably, that means taking the code and creating competing farm equipment. Fair enough.

But the problem is that the application of these concepts exists in very murky waters. Take John Deere again as an example: The company also mentioned a scenario involving tractor users tweaking their rides to play and copy music—a worry which seems a bit excessive.

“The pièce de résistance in John Deere’s argument: permitting owners to root around in a tractor’s programming might lead to pirating music through a vehicle’s entertainment system,” Wien said. “Because copyright-marauding farmers are very busy and need to multitask by simultaneously copying Taylor Swift’s (News - Alert) ‘1989’ and harvesting corn?”

Clearly, the Copyright Office will need to balance the need to protect proprietary vehicle code—something that will become more and more important as connected cars continue to come to market and as vehicles get smarter—while avoiding giving grounds for unnecessary lawsuits and protecting the tried-and-true concept of ownership. In other words, there’s a big difference between allowing tractor owners to make basic repairs on their own, or allowing aftermarket equipment modifications for one’s own personal needs, and hackers lifting proprietary source code to turn the backseat of a minivan into a pirated content paradise. The Office will have to find the right line—for now, the DMCA has become too blunt an instrument.