The company argues that allowing people to alter the software—even for the purpose of repair—would “make it possible for pirates, third-party developers, and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software.”

In fairness, this is perfectly true, and they have a legitimate economic interest in making it difficult for people to do that - although I don't agree that this should extend to being able to use the DMCA. I feel like tinkering with your own machine is an obvious case of fair use, and the DMCA should be used in cases where large chunks of one firm's software turn up in the equipment of some other firm without an appropriate license.

On the other hand, If GM or John Deere were to respond with a shrug to reports of people bricking their vehicle through firmware experimentation - a risk which I think should fall firmly on the shoulders of the hacker - then there would be howls of outrage about the gear being engineered to fail, tinkerers held hostage, lives being put at risk and so on.

[unsanctioned modifications could alter their vehicles in bad ways.] They’re right. That could happen. But those activities are (1) already illegal, and (2) have nothing to do with copyright. If you’re going too fast, a cop should stop you—copyright law shouldn’t. If you’re dodging emissions regulations, you should pay EPA fines—not DMCA fines.

Hmm, that's true as far as the fines go, but the reality of our litigous society is that when other people become the unwilling victim of a negative externality, they'll go after whoever has the greatest ability to pay, so GM will get sued for allowing these things to happen. If they're legally protected from such suits, then every vehicle accident investigation will start with a software audit and if there's any deviation from the official firmware whatsoever the manufacturer will eschew all liability. If nobody can be sued, the the negative externality will fall upon the public.

And saying that this or that branch of the government should enforce prohibitions on illegal activity is facile; this overlooks the cost of detection and enforcement, since we can't track every vehicle. Experience shows that when people know there is a high probability of getting away with some anti-social action, there are enough trolls out there that it will become a fad; for example, look up 'coal rollers' on youtube - people who modify their pickup trucks to produce as much dirty exhaust as possible, and amuse themselves by making their vehicles belch smoke at people they don't like. Offsetting this tendency at the legal level would require one of two mechanisms; either lengthy sentences designed to offset the low probability of detection (which we have now, with dire consequences), or an a priori assumption of liability where vehicular misbehavior is reported and a vehicle is found to be running non-standard firmware (which would rightly be seen as an attack on due process). Since neither of these are palatable alternatives, the likely actual response is that either prices will be raised to offset the increased tort liability claims that will be brought against the manufacturer of the original equipment, or manufacturers will invest more and more in locking down their systems by physical and digital means, which will push courts (and especially juries) closer and closer to treating modification as evidence of criminal or tortious intent.

Basically the author is acknowledging the fact that there will be problems, but handwaving them into being 'someone else's problem'. Sorry to say so, but this is a common blind spot in the hacker mentality: when the marginal costs of modification fall asymptotically towards zero (because once you have knowledge and access, modifying one bit of code is as easy as any other in labor terms), the economic incentives for abuse rise, and so the probability of abuse taking place (not by you, dear reader, but by your less-scrupulous friend in the black hat over there) asymptotically approaches 1. When that abuse results in economic loss, the costs tend to land on other people as described above, and lots of hackers heap blame on the original manufacturer for not making the product sufficiently secure (the 'burglars are doing you a favor by showing you how easy it is to break into your house' argument, which is advanced with depressing regularity here).

Meanwhile, outside of Bizarroland, actual technology experts—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation—have consistently labeled the DMCA an innovation killer.

Indeed, but this argument depends on a hypothetical - that there would be even more innovation going on if not for the DMCA. By historical standards we already live in a period of astonishing innovation, so it's just as easy to make the argument that the DMCA has been followed by an increase in innovation. Look at the expansion of the internet, communications services, and the fact that many millions of people carry around smartphones and tablets that are far more powerful than state-of-the-art workstations were in 1998 when the DMCA was passed. One could argue that the time was right for Star Trek reboot when affordable personal technology became so good that the original TV show didn't look futuristic any more.

Thankfully, we aren’t alone. There’s a backlash against the slow creep of corporate product control.

Wow, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. A purely market-based response would be not to buy products that are sold this way, ie to do like those farmers who prefer older tractors, albeit somewhat less efficient ones. But realistically that's not going to happen because farmers are squeezed by debt cycles and automation pressures as much as anyone else, so if they don't use the latest technology sooner or later they end up having to sell the farm to an AgBiz conglomerate - which is, honestly, what I think this story is really about, although the writer isn't aware of that.

The reality is that everyone wants the latest and greatest technology (because more often than not it's objectively awesome even when it's not perfect), but few people have access to the increasingly vast sums of capital required to develop it. Fortunately the ever-increasing R&D costs of ever-shrinking hardware are offset for the hacker by the ever-increasing quality and accessibility of the software stack, so modern tinkerers can do at their desk what their grandparents used to do in the garage, so to speak. This is a Good Thing, but whereas previous generations of tinkerers and innovators tended to get a working prototype and then offer it to the existing manufacturers, new investors, or the public in order to raise capital to go into production, software hackers are in the novel position of having near-zero marginal costs of production and distribution, and don't seem to recognize that this creates a major economic disincentive for the manufacturers who develop the underlying technology platform in the first place, since any floating liability is likely to fall upon them.

There's been a fundamental economic dichotomy emerging with increasing clarity on HN over the last few years. Corporate and institutional actors that act as capital stores are regarded as oppressive when they deploy technical or legal security measures (DRM, DMCA being two obvious examples), but also blamed for security failures that result in breaches of custodial responsibility (personal data theft* or allowing their IT infrastructure to be used as an attack vector by malicious actors). I would argue that it's this increasing technological asymmetry that is driving the increasing economic asymmetry in western capitalism. To put it in a nutshell, when you are only one hack away from seeing your profit margins collapse to zero, you have every incentive to suck up as much cash as you possibly can on the front end before your incentive to produce any given product disappears.

We don't have a good theory of digital economics yet, and we're not going to get one as long as stakeholders on different sides of this complex question refuse to acknowledge any other interests but their own. Producers and manufacturers must respect their customers rights to adjust and adapt the high-value capital items they've paid for to the individual problems they were purchased to solve. And hackers need to recognize that every new hackable box of tricks that appears on the market actually involved a large collective effort by other people, and stop conflating discovery of how-it-works or how-to-copy-it with authorship.

* Funny how nobody has a problem with calling it personal data theft even though they strenuously object to use of the term as regards piracy. after all, when your personal data is stolen from BigCorp and resold to identity thieves, it's not like BigCorp has lost their copy of your data. I have yet to see anyone speaking up in favor of 'identity sharing' when it comes to their own data.