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Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

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Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#191

Post by kirykl »

derefr wrote: post #177
femto wrote: post #160

This sounds like a niche for a small Pacific island. Islands like Jersey and the Cook Islands tailor their legal systems to cater for those who want a looser financial system. A small state could tailor their laws for those who want to repair things and potentially make a very nice "high tech" economy out of reverse engineering, importing broken stuff and exporting fixed stuff. Copyright holders might try and block a…

Apple already has some sort of sweetheart deal with US Customs that gets Apple parts shipped from China rejected at import time unless they're part of an Apple-tracked shipment. This blocks devices have been third-party-repaired in China from being re-imported; but also blocks "ghost-shift" (but otherwise first-party!) Apple parts from coming into the country. Literally, anything that looks like an Apple part, but is…

I don’t think that’s so much a sweetheart deal going on but good old money + lawyers

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#192

Post by muzika »

ericabiz wrote: post #165
berbec wrote: post #31

With this allow people to hack iPhones to disable "brick if 3rd party screen"?

This isn’t a thing currently. (I run repair shops and the #1 thing we do is fix iPhone screens.) Independent, non-Apple-authorized repair shops do significant enough volume that Apple has been forced to fix anything that trended toward this. Exception: The home button on iPhone 5s and above cannot be replaced by anyone except Apple. If third parties replace it, Touch ID won’t work. On iPhone 7/8, the button won’t wor…

Reason: this prevents someone from opening your phone and replacing the home button with the one that has been trained on someone else’s fingers (or hacked to work with any fingerprint?) please correct me if this is wrong.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#193

Post by userbinator »

WalterBright wrote: post #64

As the owner of a very heavily modified muscle car, I wholeheartedly agree with this. Half the fun of a muscle car is modifying it. This was easy to do with the older ones, there's an entire industry catering to it. With modern cars, manufacturers only make parts for them for 10 years or so. What are you going to do after that when the computer system in it fails? Aftermarket parts would be illegal, etc. The whole ca…

This was easy to do with the older ones, there's an entire industry catering to it.

I've always found it interesting that the Big Three US automakers will still sell you brand-new engines and other powertrain parts based on 50s-70s designs[1][2][3], while Tesla completely refuses, citing "liability" as a reason.

Effectively, this means you can build a custom car with completely new parts but based on 50-year-old technology, and new parts will likely continue to remain available, but anything even remotely "modern" is far more difficult.

[1] https://www.gmperformancemotor.com/category/ENG.html

[2] https://performanceparts.ford.com/engines/

[3] https://www.moparproshop.com/performance_engines

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#194

Post by Retra »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #134
coder543 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want a DIY arduino-hacked ... This is a professional service being done by the same professionals who you're paying to actually replace the suspension, brakes, brake lines, or other life-critical components. If you can't trust them to make a good judgement on how or whether to reset tamper detection, then how can you trust them to replace your brakes or suspension in the first place? Surely the idea is that…

He has a point though... Cars are manufactured in such way that when something fails, the failure is not catastrophic. Car might not be operational, but it is very rare that malfunction causes a crash. With SW I'm not convinced that the same can be accomplished. If you add 3rd party maintainers to the mix, it gets even worse. I still think the right to repair is worth the risk, just pointing out that it's not so clea…

The mechanic's professional responsibility is to repair the car. If we're assuming they are too ignorant to do that job, then why go to a third party mechanic in the first place?

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#195

Post by tclancy »

krrrh wrote: post #187
skunkworker wrote: post #8

It doesn't mention it in this article but this could also have a profound effect on John Deere and allowing farmers to fix their own hardware. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-americ... https://hackaday.com/2018/02/11/will-john-deere-finally-get-...

It is actually mentioned: “Repair of motorized land vehicles (including tractors) by modifying the software is now legal. Importantly, this includes access to telematic diagnostic data—which was a major point of contention.” Along with this flabbergasting detail: “You may find this hard to believe, but one major point of discussion at the hearing was whether letting people repair cars and tractors would allow them to…

I know an anti-SLAPP suit doesn't address this kind of thing, but I would like to see an actual SLAP for the attorney willing to make that argument.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#196

Post by Someone »

derefr wrote: post #177
femto wrote: post #160

This sounds like a niche for a small Pacific island. Islands like Jersey and the Cook Islands tailor their legal systems to cater for those who want a looser financial system. A small state could tailor their laws for those who want to repair things and potentially make a very nice "high tech" economy out of reverse engineering, importing broken stuff and exporting fixed stuff. Copyright holders might try and block a…

Apple already has some sort of sweetheart deal with US Customs that gets Apple parts shipped from China rejected at import time unless they're part of an Apple-tracked shipment. This blocks devices have been third-party-repaired in China from being re-imported; but also blocks "ghost-shift" (but otherwise first-party!) Apple parts from coming into the country. Literally, anything that looks like an Apple part, but is…

”Literally, anything that looks like an Apple part, but isn't an Apple part according to Apple, gets blocked”

If importing Apple-labeled products that aren’t Apple‘s property nor have been sold by Apple were legal, Apple couldn’t outsource production, as it would be undercut by its own manufacturers.

So, I don’t see why, in general, you should be able to ”import a real part into the US from the very same Chinese factory that the "officially-supplied" parts would be shipped from”, if you didn’t buy it from Apple.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#197

Post by freeone3000 »

Endy wrote: post #168
shmerl wrote: post #85

Great, but DMCA 1201 should be repealed completely. Patching it with exceptions is just fixing the symptoms, not curing the disease.

Realistically, the whole DMCA needs to be repealed, not just one piece.

DMCA is also the source of Safe Harbor provisions, which are fairly important to anybody running a site for which users can post content.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#198

Post by userbinator »

mtreis86 wrote: post #154
chrisshroba wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this true? There are mechanics everywhere, so why would every one need to learn to program something that could be made by one and sold as a commercial (or open source) project? Sure, there are many types of cars and situations that need handling, but there are far more mechanics than that. I'm genuinely asking this because I often question whether it's true that "everyone should learn to program", or it's more li…

In order to change the brakes on the rear of a Volkswagen you need a computer in order to retract the electronically adjusted calipers. This doesn't answer your question but it does exemplify the current situation. Cars aren't purely mechanical devices anymore. Computers play a large role in their operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_park_brake

I find this a bit scary --- mainly because I'm used to cars where the (mechanical) parking brake also can be an emergency brake, and the solid linkage between the lever and the braking mechanism means it is still usable even if all other power is lost. (It's also analog, unlike the "push to set parking brake" on/off behaviour --- especially useful for modulated emergency braking.)

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#199

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

quadrangle wrote: post #107
awalton wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tells me that I really shouldn't buy a Ford car, since apparently billing for repair parts is more important to them than building a robust and repairable car. Adding a tamper resistant circuit to random bits of your car's electronics is adding cost while reducing robustness - who wants that in their car?

Ford is basically stopping production of cars anyway as they found that trucks are more profitable. But yeah, don't buy one of their trucks either. But what manufacturer is an alternative? Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances!

> Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances!

I think the effect of this sort of DRM is underestimated in many conversations about post-scarcity.

People don't seem to appreciate that cryptography will create programmatic scarcity where previously we only had scarcity due to physical laws.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#200

Post by WalterBright »

chendragon wrote: post #104
WalterBright wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy who built an elevator system single board computer to control it. The big problem was the power to the board - the motor turning on and off and the old electrical system made it very spiky, which would cause the computer to glitch. He built in a lot of self-checking in the computer, but it would still fail once a day or so. He eventually fixed that by having the computer just hardware reset itself regula…

Was there any particular reason that the problem could not have been resolved through hardware since the hardware was a new development?(i.e. a UPS or better filtering?)

The customer refused to resolve the issues with the electric power. My friend did add lot of filtering, but said he'd reached a limit.
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