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Comment by rndgermandude | Hacker News Reader

There was a story of some rental car that couldn't be unlocked again on some remote parking lot, because it was out of range. The customer did nothing wrong. They ended up having to tow the car in the end, if I remember correctly.

With actual possession of vehicles going down, in favor of leases (or leases-to-buy) and short term rentals/"ride-sharing", and with ever more permanent monitoring, the future seems to go into a direction where you're required to have a constantly available data connection in your car back to the car company or lease company, and they will be able to remotely disable access if you don't pay up. And they will probably consider loss of such connection as "tampering" and disable the cars until it gets online again.

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There's a difference between owning something or renting it. When you rent something, there's a contract you sign that specifies what you can and can't do. You generally expect the owner to have the technical capability to enforce the contract in case you breach it. But when you own it, then no one else should retain any sort of control over it, period. It's yours only. (You obviously don't own something if you got it on a loan, not until you paid it off.)

> But when you own it, then no one else should retain any sort of control over it, period.

Right. But there is another issue especially with vehicles... You need insurance to operate them on public road. And insurers like to monitor things now that the tech is available/becomes available...

And the current US government wants your car to monitor your "impairness" as well[0] and brick itself if it considers you impaired.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29427068

Agreed, but with DMCA (and probably other laws) our concept of ownership is gone. Any music one buys that has DMCA, isn’t owned it’s just rented, and yet most people don’t realize that. So there’s a precedence for thinking we own something when in practice we just rent it. I can see that happening with cars. For example the law that was just passed that new cars will have to come with alcohol detectors https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2019/10/16/bil.... Whether we think this would be good or not, it’s eroding our concept of ownership.

> that has DMCA

Do you mean DRM?

I suspect that's what the OP meant. (I'm also not sure anyone sells digital music files with DRM anymore -- books and movies, yes, but not music. But I think it's kind of become cemented as the go-to example in a lot of people's minds.)

I'm specifically talking about the old-school, physical kind of ownership. Whether one could "own" infinitely copyable information at all is highly debatable.

> For example the law that was just passed that new cars will have to come with alcohol detectors

On the one hand, this is a welcome innovation because one is free to do whatever they want as long as that doesn't endanger others and drunk driving does endanger others quite a lot. On the other, if you own your car, what's to stop you from bypassing the detector like some people would bypass the seatbelt beeping thing?

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