DMCA exemption for repairs, modifications, research on your vehicle takes effect | Hacker News Reader

DMCA exemption for repairs, modifications, research on your vehicle takes effect

ifixit.org

342 pointsrosser100 comments

I haven't kept track, but last time I read about it, DMCA lobbyists managed to get a pretty absurd restriction into the exemption: Cars may only be repaired by their owners, so handing your car over to a repairman or to researchers would still be illegal.

This means in practice the excemption would only change things for people who are both highly skilled in the relevant technology and are interested in fixing their own cars - a very small subset of the initial group of people affected by the DMCA restrictions.

Does anyone know if that restriction is still present?

Could you temporarily transfer the ownership to the garage? Absurd indeed

If the common law fundamentalists are to be believed regarding "title" versus "manufacturer's certificate of origin", you aren't even actually the owner of "your" car.

What's the deal with that? Do the car companies try to say that you are only licensing the car (just like software companies only sell you a license, not actually software you can own)?

The issue isn't with the manufacturers, but the state. I can't do it justice and the whole subject is a bit crackpotty, so you're going to have to read up on your own. For example - Rights vs Privileges by Michael Badnarik.

I say "common law fundamentalists" because there is a whole community of people who have ran with these ideas and believe that the key to restoring their rights is just asserting them harder. While it would be great if true, I don't subscribe to this view and think it's much healthier to view such legal reasoning as explanations of exactly how things decayed to the point we're at.

Oh, are you referring to the freemen of the land and similar?

Yes, the third party maintenance restriction is still in place. Which really neuters the exemption. You also can't develop a tool and sell it to others. (Use it yourself all you want, just don't share it.)

Clearly, that's ridiculous and needs to change. Repair.org could definitely use help to fix this once and for all.

This is great news. It is alarming to realize that a majority of devices built after 2020 will be connected to the internet without the choice for us to vet their security. Securing these devices must be a proactive endeavor.

Only if you buy them.

Not really... There will be (already are) tons of devices that we do not own that can affect our safety, health or quality of life. For example: traffic lights controls or ventilation systems. Left insecure, they can/will be dangerous.

Or someone else buys them... http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/10/double-dip-internet-...

They will be built into infrastructure (including up to your property line), building structure, & appliances. I suppose one can go to a wood cabin in the woods, off grid (unless that sort of lifestyle flags you as "radical").

It's OK though, the US has a good track record of prosecuting executives of companies for criminal negligence when they do things like ignore their engineers, give nontechnical people authority over deciding when a product ships, staff themselves with the least experienced and cheapest engineers they can find in positions whose job description doesn't even include the word 'security' and things like that.

Oh, we're talking about systems that involve computers? Damn, guess we're on our own.

There is going to be a huge market in refurbished, older non-computerized machinery and automobiles.

With farm and heavy equipment, this tends to be true already, since it is effectively indestructible, as the depreciation is significant, while the costs to replace with a brand-new model is astronomical, and so stuff gets rebuilt, welded up, patched up, and reused until it is completely kaput, often decades after it was built.

Automobiles are trickier, especially if you are in an area that gets snow and uses a lot of salt in the winters, since the bodywork rots out quickly, much faster than the expensive mechanical components, like the engine and tranny, wear out.

Bodywork got a lot better sometime around 1995.

(I live in the vast barren norths of Michigan where roads are constantly salted during the winter months and you don't really see that many rust buckets anymore)

Non computerized automobiles are those before fuel injection became common, which dates back to the early 80's. One option would be anything with mechanical diesel injection pumps, but those will at some point be harder to get past emissions inspection.

Keeping a car that old on the road is going to be tricky, the engines do wear out at some point and bodies will go faster depending on the climate. Anything from that era will soon be a classic with associated spare parts prices.

Tractors from the 1940's still run pretty good though, there's plenty of them and they were built to last.

There are different levels of 'computerised', though. An early 90s car with EFI and ABS does have some processors in it, but they're standard modules (so can just plug a new one in if one fails) running from EPROM and have very limited communication. Unless you're worried about it being EMP-proof, that's not really a problem.

Modern cars where everything is controlled by a central internet-connected computer are a whole different proposition.

> Modern cars where everything is controlled by a central internet-connected computer are a whole different proposition.

Are cars really built this way? I thought they were still basically a network of devices, for safety reasons.

I believe it's moving more in that direction - reading the teardown of the Toyota code in the unintended acceleration case, that one system seemed to be running a whole bunch of unrelated stuff as well as reading the accelerator pedal. Also witness the numerous reports recently of people being able to affect various critical subsystems (ABS, central locking) wirelessly on modern cars.

(I'd be amazed/horrified if ABS wasn't an independent module which talks to the rest of the car, but if you can give it instructions over the wire then it's still vulnerable.)

Anything from that era will soon be a classic with associated spare parts prices.

The difference is that the parts are still much simpler in terms of complexity --- and thus ability to be reproduced --- than computerised controllers with their associated software. There are plenty of aftermarket parts for older cars and what isn't available could probably be fabricated easily or replaced with a suitable equivalent.

It will be far more difficult to do the same with modern cars, which have many more parts of higher complexity (and often deliberately designed for lock-in --- hence the DMCA.)

ObQuote: "If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." -- Thomas Jefferson

Well, this is common rule for russia - disobeying stupid laws, but, believe me, you don't want this. In such conditions everything is simple - you are always guilty.

I certainly didn't want this, but it seems we've had it for some time now. And I see no reason to celebrate winning back a small, limited exception from an unjust law that should never have existed.

woo!

right to repair is something I never want to go away. I'm thankful for these kinds of organizations fighting a battle that I can't.

the least I can offer is a good shout of approval!

and a donation to EFF ;)

How did the DMCA ever get passed? It's an absolutely insane, ludicrous set of laws.

I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA". No matter who wears it, it's probably true.

Only if you don't get sued out of business using the DMCA before even selling your first shirt.

The power which the pro-DRM industry groups have is immense.

It's the aftermath from inventing intellectual property. Patents were once called monopolies. What I find amusing is, you get this staunchly anti-government/libertarians who are also incredibly pro-IP. And yet IP is all based on governments granting monopoly power over ideas, with violations enabling the owner to engage in all kinds of punative behavior with the government as the strong arm. Ironic.

I think there's something valid about a government protected temporary monopoly. But in the case of copyright, for example, it's life plus 70 or more years. It is ridiculous, as in, worthy of ridicule. Medical patents are 20 years, which itself is too long, but it's made worse by rather permissive ways in which they can be effectively renewed by barely changing the medicine.

You know what it is? It's a way to get white collar work to continue to pay out more than, and longer than, the actual amount and duration of work on a thing takes. It's an incentive to do that kind of work. But I agree that it's grossly lopsided when you can't do repair or research on that same material - that's one of the original points of patent and copyright law. Put your ideas on paper so that you not only get protection for a while, but others can create derivatives that are better, and thereby we learn more about it all.

I thought patents were an incentive to invest in research and development. Without patents, anyone who invests in research is at a disadvantage because when they come up with something good, their competitors can copy them at no cost.

No, both they and their competitors are equally advantaged once the invention has been made. What paents give them is not freedom from disadvantage; it is an artificial advantage to justify making the investment.

Society/the government is ostensibly afraid nobody will invent if they are not artificially advantaged. Those with working intellect consider that trade secrets are enough of a protection against competition.

It's a good thing too, because as we all know, nobody ever invented anything before patents existed.

Of course not, that's why Einstein worked at the patent office.

I remember reading that the idea behind patents was to improve the knowledge transfer that trade secrets didn't offer. In exchange for a temporary exclusivity right, you are required to make public your discoveries and advancements.

The article went further into how trade secrets allowed a company to have its employees sign non disclosures and actually sue the employee and whoever else used the employer's "stolen" knowledge in criminal court, while patents changed this to be only civil and prevented employees from being sued at all.

As everything in life, a balance between the two is probably the most optimal. So I agree patents might have started going too far one way, but I doubt trade secrets would be any better in addressing OP's complaint that patents prevent the free transfer of knowledge and limits innovation.

While I never lived when trade secrets were the norm, I believe most people supporting it in favor of patents suffer from the same problem a lot of younger programmers suffer from. We keep reinventing the wheel and making the same mistakes over and over. It's all a cycle, we'll go back to trade secrets and then their issues will become more "apparent", people will have forgotten the inherent issues with patents and we'll move back to patents again, repeating the cycle.

So I personally disagree with both, you rarely solve issues by reverting back to older ways which the people before us had already tried in vain. We have to try something else, maybe a hybrid, maybe something totally different.

Once upon a time, they did serve a purpose for people such as Edison who got ripped off right and left, or so I'm told. These days, it's more about putting money in lawyers' pockets because that alleged "protection" technically isn't free: you have to pay someone to defend it. That's why the little guy still goes under. Not to mention his patent might overlap with someone else's just enough for them to try to sue him for stepping over his bounds, supposing he tries making an "improvement". Patents and copyrights are nothing more than a legal minefield. There's nothing intellectually aiding about them, at least not in this era.

>[Patents] did serve a purpose for people such as Edison who got ripped off right and left, or so I'm told

He didn't work alone, did he? I think he had a company, but you can bet he got a sweet deal with his employees on those patents.

>you get this staunchly anti-government/libertarians who are also incredibly pro-IP.

Actually most libertarian are strictly against any form of IP and patents. They prefer trade secrets over state regulation.

But then again I don't know if you mean real libertarians or just crypto-statists calling themselves libertarian because they don't know better...

Granting that the Venn diagram of "libertarian" and "Objectivist" is a contentious matter, Ayn Rand was very outspoken in her support of copyrights and patents, and one of the plots of the villainous collectivists in Atlas Shrugged was to nationalize all patents.

That Venn diagram has little to no actual overlap at all.

The objectivists just find it to be to their advantage, these days, to make it appear that they might. The controversy that you suggest is as manufactured as the controversy about anthropomorphic climate change.

Ayn Rand was also very outspoken about not being called a Libertarian, she create Objectivism to be separate and apart from Libertarianism, one of the differences between Objectivism and Libertarianism is copyright/patents

I permit others some rope when it comes to labeling themselves. I mean self-labeled libertarians, and it's pretty much all of them that believe completely in IP being literal property to be treated every bit as much, if not more than, real property. Even a couple anarcho-capitalist friend strongly believe in it. They'll all say they don't like the government's involvement, they'll say the Ip owner's insurance company should sure my insurance company if I violate a patent. So it ends up being the same thing in the end.

And I'm aware a sizeable chunk of anarcho-capitalists think IP as a concept is bullcrap.

To be fair, most forms of property come from government-granted rights. The very idea that you can own land is kind of weird when you think about it.

It's not really weird when you think about ownership just being a bunch of people agreeing to mess up anyone that tries to take something you've claimed. It takes a lot of work to maintain such an agreement, so people have to be compensated for it. If they aren't compensated to their liking, they'll take that thing and maybe other things you've claimed and maybe ruff you up for good measure.

"A bunch of people agreeing" is what a government is?

Almost. A governments is a bunch of people agreeing plus the power of those people to punish those who do not agree, without being punished back.

I'd argue the "power to punish without being punished back" stems from "being a bunch of people that agree" - ie: a bigger bunch of people than any one sub-group they might want to punish for being in disagreement.

Then there's the shift in power that comes from control over weapons and infrastructure ... but AFAIK the coordinated masses still have power on their side - partly from the assumption that given enough "external" disagreement, some people on the inside are likely to cross over.

Indeed, one could argue that the most terrifying part about the Snowden disclosures on mass surveillance, is that the current government is poised to deploy counter-measures long before any opposition consolidates and organizes. This might take the form of buying out individuals - or "dissappearing" or taking out individuals that are perceived to be in the process of becoming important.

Right. Or mineral extraction rights, and so on.

Of course. The only 'natural right' to property is the right to physical control over the things you are presently holding in your hands. As soon as you set them down, you lose every natural right over them and some social system has to step in.

>I'm going to start selling shirts that say "Today I Broke The DMCA".

That actually happened with DeCSS.

Many many years ago, in an internet far far away, some clever hackers determined how to decrypt DRM-protected DVDs. They even built a decryption program and named it DeCSS. Several court cases followed, usually based upon WIPO CC, the treaty that the DMCA implements.

In DVD CCA v. Bunner, a California court issued a preliminary injunction against a website owner for hosting DeCSS. As an entirely predictable result, the internet responded by disseminating it far and wide.

Some people even put it on t-shirts: http://www.design-reuse.com/news_img/20080804_1.gif

A clear example of the Streisand effect in action.

More recently, this happened with the decryption key that starts with 09 F9...

I'm trying to conceive of a t-shirt that would, merely by reading it, cause the reader to violate a copyright law. That one's difficult.

Maybe one with a custom EULA, "By talking to me you acknowledge that you are agreeing to these terms. Should you not agree, say nothing further."

With facial recognition, we could make a t-shirt that makes you violats the DMCA: every time a face is detected looking at the shirt, it breaks some sort of "digital lock." I'm thinking we have it decode an ISO of a DVD, but it could be almost anything.

It could be literally anything. The lawsuit by RealNetworks against Streambox over the Streambox VCR software established as legal precedent that one single bit, undocumented, is adequate to qualify as a "copyright control mechanism" and that if you ignore that bit, whose purpose you need not even be capable of knowing, you have circumvented it and broken federal law. (There is some sweet irony in the fact that the DMCA, which the Realnetworks v Streambox suit first established the legitimacy of in the courts (due solely to Streambox running out of money - they won every case until they could not afford to respond to an appeal, handing Realnetworks a default judgement) was later used against Realnetworks when they enabled their users to backup DVD movies.)

really? jeez. That's even worse. And probably enough to put about half of HN into prison.

"You are committing a crime right now": http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing-crime-r...

So my understanding is that the DMCA introduced safe harbor, which lets platforms like Youtube exist.

You can now run a social network and not get sued into oblivion for users putting up copywrighted content, so long as you're not too complicit in the behaviour. Safe harbor is a win for the internet in my book.

Without safe harbor, Google would be liable for re-distributing movies that people keep on uploading to the site. Takedown requests get a bad rap, but it's not the worst possible scenario IMO.

I don't understand - Google would be liable ONLY because there's another law saying they would be liable. Why not change that law instead of enact another set of crazy laws which demands that you keep proving you've done nothing wrong when some corporation sends a form?

If you have the most basic copyright law, then Google is liable, because they are distributing content they don't have permission to.

So tech companies want Safe Harbor. Media companies understand that safe harbor will enable some shadier businesses like megaupload (where the site owners are complicit in the content and hide behind safe harbor). So they say " OK for safe harbor, but we want a bit more protection for us, the content producers, as well." Thus a compromise is formed.

Most laws are comprises to get most people at the table, this seems like one of them.

Compromise: Taking the worst parts of 2 ideas and make an even worse singular idea.....

On paper this is true...

In reality this is only a win if you have the deep pockets of google and are able to implement all the things that Safe Harbor Requires, respond to all of the Automated and primary bogus requests in a timely fashion, and are willing to have to your platform censored to the extreme. YouTube can withstand it because of its inertia, many new platforms have tried and failed.

Safe Habor, as written, ensures YouTube's dominance in online self uploaded video.

Further Safe Habor does not protect you from being sued, it simply gives you a defense should you be sued. See the YouTube vs Viacom case.

AS such one will still have to pay lawyers to defend them, this results in many content platforms being shutdown, or never being created in the first place

No in reality Safe Habor only seems like a good thing on paper, and then only if you are a Copyright Maximalist that believe the current copyright law is acceptable or does not provide enough protection.

> Safe Habor, as written, ensures YouTube's dominance in online self uploaded video.

If I remember correctly, YouTube originally gained popularity because practically anything could be uploaded on the service. A huge percentage of it was blatantly copyrighted material.

Yes, that's right. At the time, Netflix streaming was a magical future dream, and Hulu was some weird Hawaiian word, or something. If you wanted to stream video, illegal or no, Youtube was your best bet, being the most convenient way to do it. Past Youtube, there was Bittorrent, but it was less popular by far.

To this day, if you want to watch a weird, obscure series that nobody remembers, and thus was never put on the big streaming sites, Youtube is your best bet.

You remember what the Major Media companies want you to remember.

It is revisionist history at best.

Yes there was copyrighted content on YouTube, as there is today, but no that is not why is gained popularity.

It gained popularity because it made video accessible to everyone. Before youtube attempting to host your own videos, be it a cat video, or a major movie was EXPENSIVE.

Back then, as today, most of the "violations" are actually fair use.. Copyright Maximalist however believe copyright gives them total control over their work, meaning if a person using a 1 second clip for commentary, or happens to have a song playing in the background while their baby does something cute on video and uploads it to Youtube that is a violation of copyright.

> You remember what the Major Media companies want you to remember.

No, I remember watching full movies, episodes and seasons of shows on YouTube. I remember music videos, full albums and re-uploads of content from other websites.

I remember reading from multiple sources that in the early days, YouTube willfully ignored DCMA takedowns and allowed infringing content to be shared for the views.

>It gained popularity because it made video accessible to everyone. Before youtube attempting to host your own videos, be it a cat video, or a major movie was EXPENSIVE.

There were a handful of free video hosts around at the time.

YouTube gained popularity because of the copyrighted content not because of the random crap like a dancing baby.

Popularity, is about views, not submissions.

It's weird that you've started this paranoid rant about history being re-written, when you're the one who is totally off mark. (and seem to have eluded common sense)

Corrupted undemocratic policymaking. See here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-...

One thing that I thought was funny about the hackers remotely hacking the Jeep, is that after the article was published and posted here, an HN user went on and reported them to them to High Way patrol.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9921987

Not really that funny if you watch the actual video.

You can watch it from 2:00 onwards:

http://dp8hsntg6do36.cloudfront.net/55ad80d461646d4db7000005...

Yup.

I like how people asks if the setting was necessary. Would they have got off their asses if it wasn't done on public roads?

Okay, so what did the High Way Patrol (is that seriously a thing?!) do about it?

And the HN user that reported them did the right thing IMO. Ethical research is a thing.

The user reported them to hi-po not because they were 'hacking', but because they intentionally created a dangerous situation on a highway by stalling a car, which could have gotten multiple people killed.

It's similar to the guy that decided to connect to the turbofan with his laptop on a populated passenger airplane in flight.

I argued at the time that no matter what actions they took on the highway, they were placing other cars at risk.

There are so many interactions in a vehicle that the researchers have no way of knowing with absolute certainty what will happen whenever they twiddle a bit.

Yes, 99 times out of 100, things may go as expected. The 100th time one of the O2 sensors happens to be misbehaving and suddenly your car is accelerating unexpectedly because software.

(Warning: the above example is probably complete bullshit but listen to John Hughes talk about property testing the CAN bus and you'll get nervous about ever driving again.)

> It's similar to the guy that decided to connect to the turbofan with his laptop on a populated passenger airplane in flight.

Link?

I think the poster you're replying to is mis-remembering. I'm not sure. IIRC, there was an article alleging that a passenger managed to force a slight turn of an aircraft, but subsequent investigation turned up evidence suggesting it didn't actually happen. Or at least I don't think there was any evidence the engines were under the hacker's control for any length of time.

The only articles I could find were these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5531679

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8139905

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9402336

But the first one makes some rather dubious claims and doesn't align with my memory of what I believe your OP is remembering. My Google-Fu isn't working out well for me tonight (in my defense, it's late, I'm tired, and I'm reading this for entertainment...).

Edit, also these:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/05/16/chris-roberts-...

Among others. I couldn't find the HN discussion on this, though.

Edit edit: Found the HN links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557875

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9568050

Wired published a relatively lengthy article on the incident(s):

https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-com...

> The user reported them to hi-po not because they were 'hacking', but because they intentionally created a dangerous situation on a highway by stalling a car, which could have gotten multiple people killed.

Not due to hacking, but a few weeks ago I had been involved in an accident because a Mercedes SUV randomly shut down in the middle of the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, and I had to stop in a line of cars behind said SUV while the driver behind me didn't stop in time. Luckily no one was killed(one injury, not me, but my car got totaled) but had there been any involvement in their part on something like that, I would've lawyered up and sued Wired.

Is this like a non-profit wing / initiative of the ifixit.com company?

iFixit is a social mission driven company. Just about everything we've done over the last ten years has been to expand the right to repair and make it possible for everyone to fix every thing they own.

But there are a whole lot of other organizations also interested in making repair more legal and affordable, and they wanted to start contributing time and funds. So we started Repair.org with them. There's a bunch of awesome organizations involved — ISRI (the recycling association), IAMERS (the medical device repair association), EFF, and a bunch more.

http://repair.org

Thanks so much for taking the time to clarify!

before DMCA - "whatever is not prohibited is permitted", in the DMCA world - "whatever is not permitted is prohibited". New generations wouldn't even know it the other way.

Why just cars? I'd like to be able to "repair" my printer when it runs out of ink.

And what is going to happen after three years of freedom? Back to jail again?

I was under the impression that only the distribution of any changes you make including the original code would be unlawful in this regard. Can someone clarify?

You are 'circumventing copyright protections' by changing the code. Something somewhere in these systems is supposed to stop 'tampering' avoiding that breaks the DMCA just like breaking the DVD encoding broke it.

"No user serviceable parts inside"

I don't get how it was illegal before since reverse engineering was always legal [1]. What is the difference with DMCA?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality

If it's encrypted, possibly?

The DMCA only allows reverse engineering for a very narrow "interoperability" purpose. "I wanted to fix my car" isn't "I wanted to achieve interoperability with something else", so it was illegal.

Won't this just lead to manufactures using better crypto to lock us out from changing things?

I mean, secureboot-like practices can be pretty effective at preventing modifications. They can also be sold as 'security' rather than 'fuck you we want as much control as possible'.

Only the wise men in congress would say "being able to fix your own car is a great idea, so we're going to allow that - for three years"

There needs to be a stronger push to completely repeal DMCA 1201.

If something like the DMCA was illegal, it would make sense.

The power of DMCA is only because of Google. The day we find an alternative to this great search engine of our times, DMCA will render itself toothless.

I fail to see how you think Google is responsible for the DMCA power. Google fought against acts like SOPA because it would have seriously hurt their business. The real people pushing DMCA power are Sony, RIAA, Warner Bros, and the entertainment industry who have the most to lose when it comes to this issue.

Then why do they remove the results from their so-called organic search based on DMCA requests?

I can also understand if the results are removed just from the USA based (google.com) site, but they are also removed from google.co.uk, google.co.in, etc. Since US Govt. has no jurisdiction over these other countries, I think its improper to apply DMCA blacklisting over there.

How does that equate to google search results being the only reason the DMCA has teeth? Do you think they're funding Jon Deere's legal team?

For those who don't take the time to read the (short) article, here's the most important part (IMO):

>The downside: In 2018, advocates will have to ask for permission to repair their cars again—a daunting process that costs a massive amount of time, effort, and legal fees.

>But we’re trying to change that. Yesterday, iFixit and Repair.org submitted comments to the Copyright Office in support of carving out a permanent exemption for all repair and security research—for cars and everything else. Hopefully, fixing your tractor or hunting for security vulnerabilities in your car won’t be a jailable offence ever again.

>If you want to help make the world safe for repair, join Repair.org—they’re on the front lines every day, fighting for your right to fix everything you own.

In the spirit of hyperlinks, https://repair.org

I agree, that's the most important point in this article. It's typical lawyers tactic to let the case sleep for a few years for the momentum to fade, then retry to enforce it again. In such a situation, better kill the beast once and for all.

This applies to my computer as well. I use it to drive on the information superhighway.

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