Massachusetts has passed the Vehicle Data Access Requirement Initiative | Hacker News Reader

Massachusetts has passed the Vehicle Data Access Requirement Initiative

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Larger, earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24987691

I am so glad the corporate campaign organized against this failed.

they pumped 50 MILION dollars to fight it.

I can only imagine what fossil industry and other 'big guys' are paying to have it their way.

At least here people directly voted and not politicians. We all know what the results would be if our representatives were to decide.

I choose to believe the late Tom Magliozzi of Car Talk fame put in a word with the right automotive deities to help make this happen.

Unfortunate it’s limited to cars

and it makes it much easier in court to argue that we already have it for cars, why not computers, phones and washing machines.

and software.

You can repair what you own.

Most commercial software is rented, not owned. Your iPhone's hardware is yours, but the iOS it runs is Apple's, and whatever runs in the baseband processor may belong to some third parties like Qualcomm.

But if you own a copy of software, you usually can patch it to your heart's content. Selling patched copies may be a different deal. (Of course, easy with open source.)

Not a US ruling but in the EU courts in 2012 upheld that copyright exhaustion happens even if a piece of software is "licensed not sold". Though many questions still remain and the ruling is pretty old now. [1]

Seems there was also some movement on this in France in 2019[2], though a french ruling I don't see why the same implementation wouldn't be applicable to all EU states based on the above.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_license#Ownership_vs.... [2]https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-19-french-court-valve-steam...

I wonder what the equivalent would look like for software. Open-source obviously, but what does a "right to repair" look like for a SAAS app? It sounds like this rule is mainly about accessing information about the vehicle so maybe requirements to allow consumers to export their data in a reasonable format.

A right to repair for software would be substantially similar to open source, perhaps with restrictions on commercial use, although in the car space, a right to repair is mostly about giving commercial repairers access, so maybe in software it would just mean mandating all software be open source :)

Edit: perhaps the commercial case could be limited to sharing a copy with a consultant, having them do the repair job, give you back the code and then delete their copy.

For service as a software substitute (SaaSS), I guess if you should have the right to extract your data too.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

In court? What are you talking about?

Small moves, Ellie. Small moves.

I wonder if Rich Benoit had anything to do with this.

or Louis Rossmann

What's great about this is that repair companies can move to Mass. and do mail-in repairs nation-wide, while other states get their act together.

(The USPS is often maligned, but large-volume mailers know it's affordable and almost 100% reliable.)

One of the largest aviation consumables companies did something simiilar. A guy just picked a central state with cheap warehouse rent, then advertised quick delivery on specialty airplane radio antennas (most planes have several sticking out), composite shrouds/covers, etc. and made a killing. He uses Fedex, but same idea of picking the friendliest state for a nation-wide business.) Those items weigh ounces, so shipping costs are on the lowest tier.

It's the right direction, but you wouldn't mail a car...

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