No, it shouldn't. But here's a thought: don't BUY that crap! I won't enter into a contract that forbids me true ownership of a product. An educated consumer base drives decisions like this, and the best way I can think of is to stick it to their pocket book. It's the only thing those bastards listen to.

All that being said, yeah, copy write law is really ridiculous right now. Major revision needed.

That's going to be more difficult to do in the near future, I think, especially as auto makers cram more proprietary technology into cars. This trend is most prominent with computers, like the new Surface tablet, which got a score of 0 for repairability. When you buy a Kindle or Nook book, you don't actually own the books, you just "lease" them from Amazon or B&N.

My phone is directly from Google. I'm pretty sure they don't care what I do.

My Wagon has barely-functioning electronics and I don't think my truck even has an OBC.

If your truck has a 'check engine' light or similar, it's got an OBC.

Joking aside, I agree this is very serious. What happened to the days when you could open anything you wanted and all it would do is void the warranty? I think this is a perfect example of the Government favoring large companies with blatant disregard for citizens.

With that being said, I think we should consider cars and phones differently.

I pay ATT for data every month. As long as I don't try to steal data from them, I should be able to use my phone absolutely any way I want. There's really no excuse.

I'm a little more understanding of cars, because certain changes could easily put yourself and others at serious risk. However, that is clearly not what they're trying to prevent.

Well private property is really a social construction. Strong do what they may, weak suffer what they must.

Philosophical platitudes aside, when I buy a book, I want to own it, and that doesn't happen with e-books. In ten years, when I buy a new car, I want to be able to repair it myself and take it to my local mechanic without the repair info being proprietary.

Current law requires that automobiles have certain data available to any generic sca tool, such that independent shops are able to access basic fault codes and electronic data to repair your car.

If a manufacturer chooses to, they can make advanced data only available to a proprietary scan tool -- as it should be, because it costs the manufacturer research time and expense to make sure the additional data is available and calibrated properly, and they should be compensated for it for that effort.

In general, though, I agree that making it "illegal" to jailbreak a product you "own" is absurd....firghtnening, really. And yet, we live in a society where we think it's OK for the government to tell us how much pop we can buy...

Comparing a car to an e-book is somewhat disengenuous.

You can't copy a car and sell it. People steal e-content all the time and throw it up on a torrent.

Being a former farmer, I can tell you that in general if you're buying new farm machinery you're doing it wrong. The basics of most of the stuff you would need a tractor to do (or almost any farm implement) has been the same since the 50's or so, and tractors tend not to have forced obsolescence as much as, say, passenger cars do. I can pretty effectively repair a John Deere or Case up to, say, 1980's, and there's no shortage of those out there since many small farmers (the kind most likely to hold onto old gear) have gone out of business.

I don't know if the current paradigm is really all that different from several old ones. Companies used to switch up parts specifically to make it so it wasn't worth it for most people to manufacture replacement parts on their own, and would often only sell certain pieces of the suspension, etc, as large groups of parts, not individually. The manufacturer always has found a way to get a piece of the local garage's pie, and all that's happening is that they're changing what the piece is. Also, how does a good mechanic learn? By taking things apart. Once a few of these new cars hit the junkyard, your local mechanic will know how to fix them. Possibly even before, since beyond the onboard computer itself most things stay about the same.

Half the electronics and complexity of a modern vehicle are the because of the requirements of government - i.e. OBD-II systems and safety modules for everything. Coming down the pipe at the great expense to the driver: Rear-View camera requirement, lane change warnings, etc, because people apparently no longer know how to look before they back up or change lanes...

I really don't understand why someone would require a rear view camera or lane change warning, because if someone isn't checking their mirrors now, they're not going to check their camera or their warning claxon.

Sacred - it isn't about whether or not *you* would require a rear-view camera. Person backs out of drive-way and runs over a child, who is killed (because they coudln't see kid in rear view mirror). Activitists get story, and start pushing for legislation requiring camera...corporate lobbyist selling rear view cameras start pushing legislation to back regulation.

The phrase, "To save just one child's life..." is thrown around frequently...

And you will have your rear-view camera soon enough. Mark my words.

No, I know how it works, it just irritates the crap out of me. It's impossible to make a machine that corrects for human error, and I'm of the belief that the more we try to pretend that we can, the more people will pay even less attention than they already do.

Honestly, in some ways I think a rear-view camera would be *more* dangerous.

Rear-facing radar, otoh, is a decent idea, as long as all it does is beep.

I'm an EE, so people always find it odd that I hate technology in my cars. What they don't understand is that having gone to school with people who are now putting electronics in cars, it scares the shit out of me that they're the ones working on it.