Its your car. It's Tesla software. You don't own it, just like you don't own any of the other commercial software you use.
I can't really find fault in it; they deserve the lion's share of the revenue (not Uber, Lyft, or you) if you put the vehicle into their shared ridesharing fleet for profit.
You don't have to put it into their fleet though. But if you do, them the terms.
And if you're in the tech industry, that "legal bs" is what allows you to have an income.
So what you’re saying is that just because his salary depends upon his not understanding the arguments for this to be “legal bs”, he therefore should voluntarily choose to abstain from understanding them? Upton Sinclair would turn in his grave.
Your income is physically earned, not 'allowed' to you by insidious and underhanded legal means.
Software has, by the way, always* been this way. I've been "buying software" for twenty years and I've never actually not gotten a license with it rather than the software itself, with all ownership rights conferred to me.
*within the scope of my knowledge and experience
What's next?
A blender has some kind of timer software in it so you can't use it in commercial unless you are on blender network? A TV has software for programmable channel in it, so you can't use it in your bar unless the TV vendor allow it?
Software is their implementation detail, I buy the resulting whole product.
Tesla is not prohibiting ridesharing. They are requiring the vehicle be in their ridesharing pool if you use their autonomous driving software.
Again, you own the car, not the software. Don't like the license, don't buy the car. Others will.
It's not unprecedented to have severe restrictions on software in EU. E.g. you can't use le Windows you legally obtained in France on two PCs simultaneously. Some vendors charge per-CPU/core licenses, some network software (e.g. certain PABX) charge even by the number of connected endpoints.
A car, on the other hand, is not copied after purchase, so a copyright license is not relevant. A “license” (as stated above) is not a general list of conditions you have to agree on; it is simply a list of permissions for you to do what copyright law (and trademark law, etc.) would otherwise not allow you to do. No such law restricts what a buyer is allowed to do with a car after a purchase is made, unless a contract is signed. A contract can state arbitrary restrictions, but for something to be a contract, it has to fulfill a number of conditions: it must be knowingly and willingly entered into by both parties, it must not be unilateral or even, in some jurisdictions, too beneficial to only one party. Clearly your standard so-called “license agreement” does not qualify. Ideally, and usually, a contract is something on paper which both parties sign. Do you sign such a thing when “buying” a Tesla? If so, does this contract allow resale? Does the contract require the reseller to require the second-hand buyer to also sign it?
Why? I paid them for the car. I should able to use the car however I want.
Honestly, this doesn't seem all that unreasonable. Self-driving functionality is presumably a piece of functionality that's heavily dependent upon lots of data that Tesla owns, dependent upon regularly getting software update, etc. Why should Tesla give its data and continued work on software upgrades to you for the purposes of using that for the benefit of one of Tesla's competitors?
Just face it. If you're buying a Tesla, you're not just buying a car, you're buying a software platform and access to lots of data and engineering work that Tesla provides on an ongoing basis. If you want just a car, then don't buy Tesla.
That said, if you are looking to buy a self-driving car and using that self-driving functionality for Uber or Lyft, good luck figuring out how. It would not surprise me if other self-driving cars had similar restrictions (though I guess if Uber sells self-driving cars to the general public then presumably you could use those with Uber, but probably not with Lyft).
