Volkswagen Followup, DMCA, And Two Cassandras

“’Intelligent public policy, as we all have learned since the early 20th century, is to require elevators to be inspectable, and to require manufacturers of elevators to build them so they can be inspected,’” said Dr. Eben Moglen of the Columbia University School of Law.

Yves at Naked Capitalism provided this NYT article in her Links and it is a good read detailing what is wrong with today’s policy. Big business has again exhibited its irrational exuberance with a “trust me” approach to secrecy while it rakes in $billions. The deliberate failure of Volkswagen to follow the nation’s, and for that matter the world’s, rule of law is another stunning example of business placing itself above the law. While “poisoning your customers may well land you in jail,”; we have yet to see the government take a hard stance with those such as Volkswagen and TBTF’s deliberate and planned fraud neither of which were mistakes. To some degree, GM’s ignition switch was deliberate malfeasance as management also failed to take action on a safety issue. The time for fines is long past as these business giants pay their fines and then go on to commit another crime in the name of “it’s just business.”

“Proprietary software is an unsafe building material,” Dr. Eben Moglen had said five years ago before this discovery of fraud. “You can’t inspect it.” The same as relying upon TBTF/investment firms and the peanut butter manufacturer to do their own policing, the EPA relied upon Volkswagen to do its own testing of its product. In each case, the market failed to police itself.

Again Dr Mogen; “’If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.’” Except Congress by passing the DMCA and the agencies in place to monitor the activities of business have blocked the efforts of independent researchers and simple consumers.