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EU The Courts Technology

EU Ruling: Self-Driving Car Data Will Be Copyrighted By the Manufacturer (boingboing.net) 69

Posted by BeauHD from the expect-the-unexpected dept.
Yesterday, at a routine vote on regulations for self-driving cars, members of the European Peoples' Party voted down a clause that would protect a vehicle's telemetry so that it couldn't become someone's property. The clause affirmed that "data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on data-bases inapplicable." Boing Boing reports: This is data that we will need to evaluate the safety of autonomous vehicles, to fine-tune their performance, to ensure that they are working as the manufacturer claims -- data that will not be public domain (as copyright law dictates), but will instead be someone's exclusive purview, to release or withhold as they see fit. Who will own this data? It's unlikely that it will be the owners of the vehicles.

It's already the case that most auto manufacturers use license agreements and DRM to lock up your car so that you can't fix it yourself or take it to an independent service center. The aggregated data from millions of self-driving cars across the EU aren't just useful to public safety analysts, consumer rights advocates, security researchers and reviewers (who would benefit from this data living in the public domain) -- it is also a potential gold-mine for car manufacturers who could sell it to insurers, market researchers and other deep-pocketed corporate interests who can profit by hiding that data from the public who generate it and who must share their cities and streets with high-speed killer robots.
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EU Ruling: Self-Driving Car Data Will Be Copyrighted By the Manufacturer More

EU Ruling: Self-Driving Car Data Will Be Copyrighted By the Manufacturer

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  • Self-Driving Car Data Will Be Copyrighted By the Manufacturer

    "data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on data-bases inapplicable."

    Surely stating that copyright protection is not applicable means that the manufacturer cannot copyright it either.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What I really want to know is if car owners will have the right to be forgotten.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You mean "Yes, I bought a car from you 10 years ago but I sold it. Stop sending me spam and no, I don't need to tell you who I sold it to."
        Because that is essentially what GDPR is, except that they can't just stop sending you spam, they have to remove your name and address (and credit card number and whatever more they have) from their database.
        A couple of years down the line when their computers get hacked you shouldn't have to worry that your credit card information is for sale somewhere.

    • I had to reread it a few times to make sense of it.

      The clause was submitted as part of the regulations. If it was accepted then copyright rules would be inapplicable. It was not accepted. This actually leaves the rules in a bit of a grey area.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrMr ( 219533 )
      Of course it does, but they may now try to obscure the data. That would get into the way of a nice story. By collecting data that can be related to a person the manufacturer will need to comply with the EU data directive. That includes things like the obligation to provide you with everything they have on you, the requirement to remove and forget data after its stated purposed has been achieved and the requirement of informed consent on the re-use of anything they are even allowed to collect etc. Especially

    • Surely stating that copyright protection is not applicable means that the manufacturer cannot copyright it either.

      Maybe they can't copyright it, but if they are the only ones with a copy (be sure that will be the case) they can still sell it to people like advertisers.

  • Results unclear (Score:5, Informative)

    by imidan ( 559239 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @06:03PM (#57464296)

    IANAL, but I've done some research on database copyright law in the EU. So, in the EU, databases (which aren't necessarily data kept in a DBMS, but just collections of data) are not copyrightable except in case of 'sui generis' databases, which are copyrightable 'if they constitute intellectual creation by virtue of the selection or arrangement of their contents.' The conditions a database needs to meet in order to constitute intellectual creation have always been a little unclear to me.

    Anyway, whoever wrote the struck-down clause was trying to affirm that these data do not qualify as sui generis, and therefore cannot be copyrighted. But just because the clause was removed doesn't make it obvious that the data do qualify as sui generis and therefore are eligible for copyright. I suspect it kicks the question down the road to some kind of court proceedings. But that's just a guess; it'll be interesting to see what happens.

  • OK, so let's say the self-driving car company holds a copyright on the data generated by your movements around town, but Google is already collecting this data and probably a bunch of other companies as well. Does this set up a legal battle when that information gets sold to third parties, as it inevitably will? I wonder, when every corporation is able to track everything we do, will our personal data still have any value to them? If they can't use it to gain advantage, will they still fight so hard to c

  • So will it take an criminal trial to force them to give out the data?? Say just an basic civil case they can say no DATA for you.

  • The clause which was removed disallowed copyright on telemetry data, but removing it does not give that copyright to the manufacturer. This does leave room for a law which gives a non-transferable copyright to the driver of the car.

    This is unlikely, the party which voted to remove this clause seems to be firmly in the pocket of business interests, but it's not fair to say that they've sold everyone out just yet.

  • I'm not a lawyer, but who ever does the work to make the data - the owner of the car telling it to go somewhere - owns the copyright.
    It's like Adobe saying anything you create in Photoshop is the exclusive property of Adobe.

    It's either data and can't be copyrighted, it's owned by the owner of the vehicle, or the vehicle owner has explicitly transferred the rights of the information.

    • As a matter of fact, Wolfram Alpha has (or used to have) a very similar assertion - if you discovered something using Wolfram Alpha, Steven himself had to be given credit, or something along those lines. Vis.:

      Therefore, "failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram Alpha is not only a violation of [its license terms], but may also constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law."

      I am not aware of anyone having made an issue out of it either way (and the software i

  • Right to repair? (Score:3)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @06:49PM (#57464530) Journal
    Could this be the EU's way of blocking the right to repair?
    Reading the data from the car and doing repair work is an opening to counterfeiting?
    Would the EU like to see only authorized companies able to use the car data?
    The loss of any freedom to talk about EU car repair on the internet?

    What happens when the car owner violates EU car copyright laws?

    Your car needs a service.
    The car company believes no car should get an unauthorized service.
    You are an unfit car owner.
    Your car will be placed in the custody of the car company.

    • Could this be the EU's way of blocking the right to repair?

      Unlikely. Title of the article is contradicted in summary, which states that the data cannot be under copyright at all, which means neither by the car owner nor car manufacturer.

      The problem remains that independent repair shops still can't access the historical data, which gives authorised shops advantage. However, even if the car owner holds copyrights to the historical data, this is of no use, since it is held on servers that are not accessible to the car owner. For example, if I buy a book that is printe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The EU didn't actually say that the manufacturer owns the data though. The merely declined to say explicitly that the data /cannot/ be copyrighted. So the question of if it can be copyrighted is still open, and in the EU databases and this kind of generated data generally can't be.

      The way this works is that someone objects to a relatively minor addition late in the day and it's not worth holding the whole thing up to deal with. Essentially they just kicked the can down the road a bit, allowing the possibili

    • Just as likely this is part of an overall strategy to make ownership of a vehicle unattractive, placing barriers in the way of it being practical. Which is part of a more wide-reaching movement towards discouraging regular (i.e. not The Rich) people from ownership of just about anything, substituting 'rental' or 'monthly service. Make vehicles 'lease' only, and part of the legal contract is that you're required to pay an authorized dealership service department for service.

  • Immigrants will only be able to purchase/be given self-driving cars (and trucks).

  • fight it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Spend your free time at local car dealerships, asking to see cars that don't collect data. Leave when they fail to guarantee it. If you're really bored, start the purchase process and back out at the last minute when you "realize" that the cars collect and share data about you that is beyond your control. The dealerships will put pressure on the manufacturers, or they will sell different cars.

  • Yet another good reason to tax robots (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @07:07PM (#57464624)
    and "Intellectual Property" too while we're at it. If the ruling class is going to claim ownership of everything that's fine, but we'll tax the heck out of it so they can't use that ownership to gut the commons. Or, well, we'll let them gut the commons and go back to the gilded age. Not sure which yet.

  • who owns airplane black box data?

    as the same type of data needs to be same say in self driving cars

    • Not exactly. An aircraft's black box is a sturdy device that stores data for a certain amount of time (say a few hours). This means that:
      • Old data is automatically deleted
      • The data is not sent to a central server, so it is not collected, unless the aircraft has an accident
      • A special company has to get the data from the device, so you cannot "accidentally" (the Google argument for wardriving entire continents) collect the data.

      In other words, there is no data to be owned, and in the case of a crash the data

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OhPlz ( 168413 )

        Black box isn't the right example. The Malaysia Airlines jet that went missing is a better example. The Rolls Royce engines were sending diagnostic information back to the manufacturer, in which case the manufacturer is asserting ownership of the data. But they probably also "lease" the engines rather than selling them outright. This is what will likely happen with autonomous vehicles.

  • If you are in one of the five eyes nations the new class of Access and Assistance Bills our Attorney Generals are negotiating will mean data generated by your car can be legally taken without your knowledge and used as evidence against you.

    See section 27D [homeaffairs.gov.au]

    You had better not unknowingly go anywhere or be around someone you should not.

    • And this is why I'll never own a car that have a Wifi AP/LTE/OnStar/BlueLink/FordPass/etc

    • I think the solution to that is just have a bunch of people driving around in old British Leyland vehicles with original Lucas generators, points, coils, and plugs. The amount of EM interference from those would likely damage all of the modern sensitive spy equipment.

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