Mazda recently surprised customers by requiring them to sign up for a subscription in order to keep certain services. Now, notable right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann is calling out the brand.
It’s important to clarify that there are two very different types of remote start we’re talking about here. The first type is the one many people are familiar with where you use the key fob to start the vehicle. The second method involves using another device like a smartphone to start the car. In the latter, connected services do the heavy lifting.
Transition to paid services
What is wild is that Mazda used to offer the first option on the fob. Now, it only offers the second kind, where one starts the car via phone through its connected services for a $10 monthly subscription, which comes to $120 a year. Rossmann points out that one individual, Brandon Rorthweiler, developed a workaround in 2023 to enable remote start without Mazda’s subscription fees.
However, according to Ars Technica, Mazda filed a DMCA takedown notice to kill that open-source project. The company claimed it contained code that violated “[Mazda’s] copyright ownership” and used “certain Mazda information, including proprietary API information.”
Locost 7 is a generic name for replica Lotus/Caterham 7 type cars that are built by people in garages, there’s no centralised body beyond “The Book” the original design came from. As far as I’m aware the book’s author has defended the design in court as being too generic to be protectable (which presumably precludes their design being used as a basis to prosecute anyone building something similar).
Most of the cars are built custom to the donor vehicle, taking the original design as a basis, there’s 100s of variations online with drawings - none of them are going to be protectable and no-one’s really tried in the 30 odd years since the book came out. No-one’s published anything with a libre license, I’m not sure if there’d be any point.
If the author licenses the book under a creative commons or other libre license, its open source. If not, its not open source hardware.
If the author would just announce that the book is licensed openly, then it would liberate lots of other orgs to be able to include his work in their work. Otherwise this is a dead end for other open hardware manufacturers