Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Toyota and TPMs

Toyota is sticking (pardon the pun) to its supposed rights to control the TPMs in its cars' black boxes.

These boxes may contain useful information for plaintiffs in various lawsuits, not to mention regulators. But only Toyota can decode this information and "says it only makes the data available when requested to do so by law enforcement, federal regulators or by court order", according to the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog.

The obvious questions that now arise, such as whether we can trust Toyota to provide full disclosure of the decoded information, once again require that we ask whether any protection for TPMs is warranted in the absence of all necessary protection from them.

Indeed, maybe we need go even further to ask whether there are some situations - such as the use of TPMs in automobile black boxes - where such protection should actually be prohibited.

HK

1 comment:

  1. When I sent in my comments during the Canadian Copyright Consultation, one of my suggestions was that Technical Protection Measures should be illegal, a suggestion that I suspect was meet by horror from the industry.

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