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Bigger question as mentioned in the article. Who owns the copyright? If I bought a car, I should own all the data from it.

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Sure, but you're also party to an adhesion contract where you're forced to surrender that ownership to the manufacturer. As Coase pointed out, the initial allocation doesn't matter so much as the market will get it to whomever can best exploit it. The liability is in carving out a market-legible ownership handle to begin with.

But copyright is likely moot anyway, as the cars will be imprisoned [0] with strong digital restrictions to siphon the data to manufacturers while preventing access by people.

[0] The complement of "jailbreak", right?

EU laws in general are quite hostile to adhesion contracts - pretty much all terms that where a consumer is forced to surrender something meaningful to use a product they bought are considered null and void in EU. If customer is shown a common EULA stating "you surrender copyright of these things to the manufacturer" and needs to click "I agree" before proceeding, then in EU that does not imply any legally binding commitment whatsoever and does not imply that the consumer surrendered those rights; if they were forced to do so in a standartized mandatory agreement, then that doesn't count.

You won't be buying any cars in future...

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