“The things you own eventually own you,” said Tyler Durden in Fight Club. His rebukes of consumer culture could just as easily have come from someone who has a row of project cars on his lawn, and no means to fix them – or no authority to fix them. In that vein, it’s appropriate that the ongoing debate over repair law sounds like a bizarre subplot pulled from a dystopian movie, as Hollywood’s fear of VCRs makes it harder for you to do work on your own car.
The furor over OEM gate keeping software in cars to drive people to authorized service centers (read: dealerships) is in essence about who can rightfully access the codes inside the things you own. This enters the realm of privacy and modern digital rights management (DRM), which you may recognize from password-related media moments like “Wait, they’re not streaming this anymore?” and “Hey, where did half my music library go?” And DRM leads to copyright and fair use arguments, the origins of Hollywood’s beef with VCRs in the 1970s.
Film studios feared that Sony’s new Betamax VCR technology would eliminate control over viewing, encourage piracy, and reduce studio profits. Cite the lawyers and try to stop VCR sales. This argument flopped in court, but it led to a chain reaction of legislation that evolved over the years. This now applies not only to music and film rights, but impacts the entire world of rapidly changing digital technology, such as the software that plays shows in our cars.
Accessing VCRs to Cars
We can’t possibly cover all the intricacies of US copyright law here, but some of the key parts of the policy related to fair use take us from VCRs to car repair. Copyright Act 1976 Limits were established on exclusive rights for content creators, while allowing fair use of copies of their work for non-commercial things like news, criticism, teaching, and research. The film studios argued that recording TV shows at home was not fair use.
In 1984, the Supreme Court disagreed, forever changing the direction of domestic media. In 1985, sales of the VHS format topped box office sales, while Hollywood sought the technology to restrict illegal copying. Read-only DVDs came to the US in 1997, but the real game-changer in the eyes of the Motion Picture Association of America was the 1998 lobbying effort. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). And that’s what brings us to fixing cars.
The DMCA contains important anti-fraud terminology – specifically, it is illegal to bypass technical security measures such as passwords or codes to access copyrighted works or the intellectual property stored in the software behind them. The thing about software in new cars is that it’s everywhere. Even the ancient art of changing a tire may require resetting the tire pressure monitoring system.
It is difficult to work safely on a modern car without access to OEM software, and requires the OEM to provide access. that’s the gist of it repair actWith some DMCA vehicle repair exemptions – and a movement toward simpler vehicles like repairable, no-tech tractors.
Stay tuned to know more about the technology of tomorrow
Today we bring our entire entertainment library everywhere, including cars. “Our” pile of stuff lives in a tech company’s cloud, which, ironically, is neither Nimbus nor Cumulus, but the building. Ownership is actually hidden access. But for many of us, the convenience of streaming outweighs some of the clutter, and the benefits of these innovations far outweigh the compromises.
The same is true of technology in cars. An over-the-air update can magically unlock hands-free driving assistance. We love the beauty of in-dash navigation when it’s done right, but we remain troubled by the idea of an in-car subscription. And we have the endless roadtrip playlist at our disposal, but draw the line at unwanted pop-up ads on the infotainment screen. Maybe this is too much. Maybe this is not enough. Maybe we just forget the button.
Meanwhile, 50 years later, Hollywood’s fear of the VCR continues to waver. Millions of ordinary people watch videos wherever and whenever they want. The VHS miracle of being able to follow a workout tape in the privacy of your own home has long given way to stronger platforms like Instagram and YouTube, which hobbyists and enthusiasts now rely on to share and learn how to fix and customize their vehicles – or teach their kids. Hopefully this will continue, and we’ll avoid a future where DIY repairs are too expensive to even be possible, due to some devious plot by the factory.
