Bob Barr and Ralph Nader have published a joint statement supporting the Right-to-Repair Act of 2009.
An excerpt:
The basic fairness, transparency and pro-competitive nature of this legislative proposal are hard to argue against. However, if for no other reason than the bill proposes to change the entrenched status quo, serious opposition is guaranteed. In the best of times, the right-to-repair proposal would be viewed as good legislation. In these troubled times for consumers, HR2057 should be considered as “must-pass.”
The identifier at the bottom of the article incorrectly calls Nader “the Green Party’s candidate for president in 2008.”
The statement garnered reaction from Lew Rockwell
Messrs. Barr and Nader would use the federal cluster bomb to force car companies to reveal their trade secrets to every Tom, Dick,and Harry repair shop.
and the Electronic Frontier Foundation
In short, thanks to the DMCA, we need a Right-To-Repair Act not just for cars, but increasingly for all the things we own.
drl, thanks for your insightful feedback.
It does seem odd that Barr would sign onto this effort. I’d like to hear his rationale.
This one doesn’t seem to be a profoundly malignant position to me. If Barr called for suspending the Bill of Rights, I’d not need an explanation, and I’d be suggesting some sort of sanction.
My point — which you didn’t seem to get — is that sometimes legal matters have some nuance to them that requires some patience to wade through. As we learned from the CLiPr torture release, the precedent says that 5A doesn’t apply non-citizens as it does to citizens, or some such. We might not AGREE with the Supreme Court decision and the body of constitutional interpretation, but it is what it is.
I’d suggest the same sort of thing may be true in this case.
But, Don, maybe I should check in with you first on whether an issue is relevant or not. Your postings indicate a man of deep sophistication đŸ˜‰
Good ole Bob, the non PhD of the George Phillies tribe. Blah, blah, blah. Irrelevance to the max!
Trade secrets are neither copyrighted nor patented. A trade secret is information which you simply keep secret and declare to be a trade secret. Copyrighted works are those works which are declared owned (but not secret) and can be registered with the Library of Congress. Patents are for inventions (sometimes retardedly ambiguous) and regisered via the PTO. They cost a lot of money and take a lot of time.
The best source of info is the DMCA, which Clinton signed into law. It created the ‘trade secrets’ classification.
re, it might be relevant for ring-of-hell assignment đŸ˜‰
bob, I don’t know if they are patented or not, but that would be irrelevant to the discussion.
re, were the “trade secrets” patented?
@ #8 – Lew Rockwell’s blog post was not supporting government granted privileges for some inventors. It was blasting a Nader/Barr attempt to force companies to give up proprietary information. There is nothing in the blog which suggests that the information should be protected by government granted privilege. There is a difference between “trade secrets” and government patents.
Compare Lew Rockwell’s recent blog post favoring government-granted privileges for some inventors:
Bob Barr’s Right To Repair
Posted by Lew Rockwell at May 19, 2009 09:33 AM
Former federal prosecutor Bob Barr, the Libertarian presidential nominee last year, has joined Ralph Nader to call for…more federal intervention in the economy. Thanks, boys, we needed that.
That is, Messrs. Barr and Nader would use the federal cluster bomb to force car companies to reveal their trade secrets to every Tom, Dick,and Harry repair shop. This is called the “right to repair.” Well, you certainly have the right to repair your own property, or other people’s by contract, but not the right to steal the computer codes, etc. of Toyota in the name of “fair competition.” That’s always a synonym for the SWAT team.
with Jeffrey Tucker’s articles on the free e-book “Against Intellectual Monopoly.”
I just skimmed the article but it sounded like there was previously a law that limited competition from non-dealership-run repair shops and this would fix that problem. Do I have it wrong?
Uh, anybody read Chilton’s lately? Most of the info needed is in there, and the rest is learned the old fashioned way–handed down under the shade tree and in the small garage.
The simplest trade secret of all is get a car from when they were actually cars and not computers with tires.
rc, if Barr has been reading Kinsella on IP, he certainly has misinterpreted Kinsella – or is misrepresenting him.
Hopefully a wave of the future!
—-Perot, Perot, Nader, Nader, Nader Voter
I agree with this bill, but Nader must have been pretty surprised to find that Barr did too.
Perhaps Barr’s been reading LRC and Kinsella on IP…
This is clearly a bad piece of proposed legislation, attempting to interject the Federal government into private contracts between auto manufacturers and consumers.