GM says you don’t own your car, you just license it
GM says you don’t own your car, you just license it Literally not your father's Oldsmobile by Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing | May 21, 2015 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 ...