Mazda is angry a customer used an API in a manner they couldn’t control. You can read the DMCA takedown notice here.
This doesn’t make any sense. API requests are not proprietary.
Mazda’s DMCA takedown kills a hobbyist’s smart car API tool
Submitted 6 months ago by DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/mazdas-dmca-takedown-kills-a-hobbyists-smart-car-api-tool/
Comments
UniDestroyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
ultranaut@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yep, this looks like a blatant abuse of the DMCA by Mazda. Either Mazda is engaging in scummy behavior or they need better lawyers. Either way, it makes me want to never buy another Mazda.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It reads to me like: “this app does the same thing as our app therefore they must have copied our code; there is no other possible explanation”. Cool story, bro. I hope the developers will fight back but that takes lots of money.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 6 months ago
So what? They have more money, they decide what is legal or not.
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I didn’t really get it until I read the article (shut up 😃), but it seems pretty clear that Mazda’s primary concern here appears to be access to this API through Home Assistant cutting off future (maybe current) owners’ requirement to subscribe to their app for features.
rem26_art@kbin.social 6 months ago
man, remember when you could buy a car and it wasnt connected to the internet?
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 6 months ago
Remember when you could buy a car and it was yours?
OrderedChaos@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Pepperidge farms remembers.
archomrade@midwest.social 6 months ago
What a load of horse shit.
Just like with hue, and Chromecast, and Android TV, and a million other smart devices, it’s perfectly lawful (and IMHO necessary) for individuals to launch their own integrations with their the products they own. People don’t need their bullshit “service”, and by buying the vehicle they have a legally protected right to alter it and it’s software for their own use.
That they bullied this guy into taking down the repo despite what the law protects him to do is disgusting, if not also predictable.
I hope someone with the time and resources goes to the matt with one of these shit companies and make them own up to their exploitative practices.
I for one will be altering my Mazda how I want and sharing my alterations to get around their shit subscription model with everyone I can.
the_third@feddit.de 6 months ago
Then charge me 5€/month and give me an access token. Fuckers.
But likely, having whatever data the app collects is deemed more valuable than that.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 6 months ago
God forbid. Wouldn’t want users to find any of this useful in novel ways. Because that never makes a product popular or anything. And Mazda might lose hundreds of dollars or something. Gasp.
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Pretty soon we’ll have to subscribe to our car’s trunk.
synestine@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
BMW on the line for you, sir.
FakinUpCountryDegen@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Eh, it’s preferable when companies go ahead and self-identify as being comprehensively dog shit and worthless.
Just another company to throw on the list who will never receive a single dollar of my money as long as I live.
Won’t lose a wink of sleep over it. Good luck, Mazda.
AeroLemming@lemm.ee 6 months ago
What do you do when they all do it, though?
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Buy a dumb car again, as long they’re still around 😊
CADmonkey@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Motorcycle?
FakinUpCountryDegen@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’ll move closer to the city and walk or use public transit.
Frankly, that’s unlikely. The free market will always make sure someone is there to disrupt, and I’ll always support the disruptor.
xGIHOST@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yep. I wouldn’t want to make it into a list but bmw and mazda are already on my blacklist
FakinUpCountryDegen@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yep Mazda is my first auto maker blacklist… I’ve got Sony at the top from numerous incidents around 2004-2006, and Google since 2016. (obvs can’t get 100% away from Google because they keep buying companies, but I only need to get rid of my Nest and Fitbit shit to be completely google-free!)
aniki@lemm.ee 6 months ago
[deleted]min_fapper@iusearchlinux.fyi 6 months ago
Lol no it wouldn’t. The guy doesn’t want to commit resources to fight this, since it’s a hobby that’s not gaining him anything.
Unless y’all give him enough money to mount a legal defense, no amount of fancy tech will help
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Oh god.
Federation is going to become the next blockchain thing that people have no idea what it does but insist it’ll fix everything, isnt it?
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 6 months ago
I think he only means in a literal sense. If the thing is copied a ton of times to several repositories, it becomes harder to expunge it entirely. Legal battles notwithstanding.
TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Isn’t Git kind of naturally federated in a broad sense just by the way it works? As long as someone has the source code they can always create another Git repo and share it.
bemenaker@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Absolutely false.
nephs@lemmy.world 6 months ago
DMCA is broken, intellectual property is a scam.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
It seems to be working exactly as intended. It protects the OP of the rich while not giving a shit about the poor.
ZiemekZ@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Intellectual “property” shouldn’t exist. The property system was designed to solve the scarcity of physical goods. Information doesn’t have this problem since it can be replicated forever as long as you have a medium to copy it to. That’s why you can’t own information. Once created, it lives its own life, whenever you like it or not.
bad_alloc@feddit.de 6 months ago
I don’t get it. People are working for free to add a feature to your product which might move more people to buy said product. Make users who use external features acknowledge some waiver that your company is not responsible for damage. If it turns out to be really good, you can fork it, hire the original inventor and turn it into a paid product. Isn’t that a risk-free win? Am I missing something?
ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Most likely they do not appreciate people adding features to their products for free because these are features that could be sold on future models. This is why right to repair is so important.
DemBoSain@midwest.social 6 months ago
Or, it’s something they want you to subscribe to. I bought a Subaru, and only later found out the only way to use remote-start was by subscribing to roadside assistance and using an app on my phone.
On the bright side, I can start my car from anywhere in the world…
elscallr@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well then, anyone have this code archived? Time to make sure it makes it to torrent networks. The only way we render the DMCA irrelevant is to make it useless.
DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Without a somewhat centralized codebase, development will be an absolute nightmare. Old torrenr floating about with bugs or so old there has been breaking changes in the software. With no single place to report and collect fixes and development it’ll be a fragment pile of crap real fast.
uis@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Maybe host somewhere in Russia or Finland/Sweeeden.
Fades@lemmy.world 6 months ago
What a fucking joke. Let me tell you, these car OEM’s are fucking SHIT at API development in general. Shit, it’s a fuckin miracle when they actually have APIs. A major OEM (won’t mention as it’s work related for me) just recently published their APIs and GOD are they fucking trash
This is simply a shit company trying to punish people because of their own incompetencies when it comes to API design and management. Oh and just anti-consumer in general, just like how they attack right-to-repair at every fuckin turn possible.
FUCK capitalism, it’s fucking broken; instead of ensuring that competition drives innovation we instead get… LESS control LESS features for MORE across the board (subscriptions, anyone?). Anyone talking about the free market’s inherent innovation is a FUCKING GODDAMN MORON
lightnegative@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well, without the free market innovation, I guess you’d just be complaining about the quality of your horse and cart on the way to church instead
bob_wiley@lemmy.world 6 months ago
[deleted]DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It won’t go obsolete per se. It will just have lots of security vulnerabilities after they stop patching the 10,000,000+ lines of code used in all the microcontrollers and microprocessor.
AnarchoGravyBoat@kbin.social 6 months ago
I'll be buying a new car soon. Fuck Mazda.
bitwolf@lemmy.one 6 months ago
So … is there a copy of the repo left that we can replicate endlessly?
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Should be legally protected and these companies should receive heavy fines for false DMCA claims
woodenskewer@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Call me crazy but you think there’d be some kind of reviewing body that reads dmca claims heard by both parties prior to entering a court room rather than people with money fucking the average person.
notannpc@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I already thought Mazda sucked and made shit products, so it’s nice that they confirmed it’s not just their products that are mediocre at best, it’s their whole business.
kool_newt@lemm.ee 6 months ago
My cx-50 is awesome, I got it because my old Mazda3 was awesome and super reliable. (as far as cars go, which are all dirty death machines)
5BC2E7@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Can you elaborate? All the people I know had good experiences with mazda
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Yea, not sure what hes comparing Mazdas to.
As someone who’s turned wrenches since the late 70’s, Mazda is in my top 3 for reliability: Honda, Toyota, Mazda, in that order.
Every other brand you get to fix the same thing more than once, have weird failures, mixture of Metric and ACU bolts (looking at you American Manufacturers), over-designed systems making trouble-shooting and repair more difficult and costly (like VW tying the door lock ECU to the air conditioning), crappy electrics (Chrysler/Dodge wins on this one, they’re almost as bad as as 70’s British car with Lucas electrics), weird and problematic mixtures of vendor sources (again, Chrysler, since the days they bought AMC they’ve continued to have hodge-podge vehicles, like the Chryslers with Mercedes diesel engines, but modified so they don’t always use the exact same parts), etc, etc.
I could go on for days listing each manufacturer’s pain points.
Far less so with the 3 Japanese listed. For the most part, their vehicles are all their own (some exceptions with Mazda when they were owned by Ford, and Toyota had some GM ties over the years), and even those cars are more Japanese design/engineering/manufacturing than Big 3.
notannpc@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Tried to search up what I could have sworn was bad quality control problems. Turns out I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.
Frostbeard@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I have a Mazda6 estate 2.2 diesel and pretty happy with it. Compared to other cars in the same class it’s no worse regarding reliability as far as I could research
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 6 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Before last week, owners of certain Mazda vehicles who also had a Home Assistant setup could create some handy connections for their car.
In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub, Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler’s integration:
Frequent Home Assistant contributor J. Nick Kolston, or bdraco on GitHub, was the first of many commenters confused by Mazda’s code claims.
Reverse-engineering for interoperability, such as exposing the Mazda app’s particulars to Home Assistant, could be considered a fair use exception to the DMCA, as explained by the EFF.
Integrations involving other car brands, including Subaru, the Nissan Leaf, and Tesla’s Wall Connector, are still present.
“We genuinely believe there is a common ground between us and Mazda when it comes to enabling the owners of their cars to explore the possibilities of their own data,” Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen wrote.
The original article contains 523 words, the summary contains 146 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Bad bot
In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub, Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler’s integration:
Alleges that Rothweiler’s integration what? You’ve cut off an important part of the story.
BilboBargains@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This is like sueing someone for knocking on your door. Just lawyers and business vampires tripping over their own dicks.
Uglyhead@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Just start charging exorbitant amounts of money for every API call; problem solved! —Spez