Adafruit: From Ultimate Driving Machine to Ultimate Rent-Seeking Machine: The BMW Logo Screw Patent.
If you haven’t already heard, BMW’s R&D teams have been busy “innovating.” Unfortunately, they aren’t focusing on the things that actually matter—like stellar engine performance or the legendary driving dynamics that gearheads love. Instead, the C-suite execs decided that the best use of their engineering budget was to design a proprietary security screw specifically intended to prevent BMW drivers from fixing their own cars.
That would be circumventing a protection mechanism. Isn’t that a violation of the DMCA in the US?
No. It is a physical item. So long as 5here is no branding it would be fine
Yes and and violating anti-circumvention is now a crime… not a civil offense, prison. For repairing an item that you own.
I guess that’s what we, the labor class, get for not spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists like the Founding Fathers intended.
The digital millennium copyright act? That thing that companies use to take down copyright violation videos and photos?
I think this is more likely patent law which is not something that has ever stopped Chinese manufacturing from producing cheaper alternatives to the same concept.
The DMCA has a section that says (high level) it is illegal to circumvent a technological protection measure that protects copyrighted materials. DMCA was used for years to prevent farmers from repairing their John Deere’s equipment themselves. They only got that 2 years ago after a legal battle. So the question is: can a fancy screw be considered a TPM?
DMCA is interpreted very widely.
It criminalizes circumventing anything that could be used to protect copywritten information. So they just add copywritten stuff where it isn’t needed to criminalize anything they don’t want you to do. It’s why washing machines now have proprietary software and circuit boards instead of mechanical switches and why printer ink cartridges have chips on board.
Amazon does not want to enforce this. By the time one seller is banned, 10 new accounts sell the same thing again.