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Re:The Fight for the “Right to Repair” by nathan_long on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @03:21PM (#12088883)
And also whether the modification is relevant the the problem. I can imagine court cases where the driver argues that the change they made was irrelevant to the accident that occurred.
Re:The Fight for the “Right to Repair” by Silhouette on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @03:49PM (#12089112)
This sort of issue has already been tested in court and, at least here in Europe, generally seems to follow common sense. For example, if a new top-of-the-range smartphone suffers a hardware failure after 3 months, the manufacturer can't disclaim any responsibility for that and exempt themselves from our normal consumer protection standards just because the owner had flashed custom firmware onto their device (unless the custom firmware was actually a causal factor in the failure, presumably, though I'm not sure that scenario has been tested in court yet).
Re:The Fight for the “Right to Repair” by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @03:26PM (#12088919)
Right, and unlike a lot of other cases with software, how this was decided might actually result in jail time. For example if a modification was deemed negligent and resulted in the death of a person, whoever made/authorized the modifications could be charged with manslaughter/murder.