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Car makers want life sentences for reverse engineering
A couple of Michigan legislators want to lock people away for life for reverse engineering car software. It’s already illegal to do it in many cases; the DMCA protected Volkswagen for a while from having its cheatware discovered, and it prevents people from creating diagnostic tools in competition with the licensed ones. I’m not surprised the Detroit car lobby would try for even stronger measures, though I didn’t expect it to get quite this draconian.
America got rich through its (relatively) free market. Now, the government pushes the state monopoly, which is “intellectual property rights,” to try to prevent competitors from catching up. As the US market becomes less competitive through these restrictions, other places, including China, will forge ahead.
People piss me off. Imprisonment as a punishment is already wrong. Punishing people for trying to understand something is already wrong. But that doesn’t stop people from wanting to do both in a single, malicious act.
