The US Moves to Protect Your Right to Hack and Tune Your Car
Let freedom ring. The Library of Congress defined a few new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as part of its typical review process. The one we care about? Allowing people access to (and tune) a portion of the software that runs your car. This means that digitally tuning engines (increasingly popular given the complexity of turbocharged drivetrains) is fully protected under the law in the US. Good news given the fact that many automakers were attempting to define any digital manipulation as copyright infringement.
<p>Link to the PDF doesn’t work.</p>
<p>Here you go!</p>
<p><a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/10/28/2015-27212/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control" rel="nofollow ugc">https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/10/28/2015-27212/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control</a></p>
<p>The DMCA has been massively abused. Companies are now putting pointless code into products that don’t need it to prevent cloning and the like. That’s why when the DMCA was first passed all those off brand ink cartridges went away. Seems if you put some digital handshake between a product and a consumable, it effectively locks out companies from making lower cost replacement products. The law of unintended consequences strikes again!</p>