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.”
There are no penalties for filling a bogus DMCA takedown and the legal cost for restoring the content falls on the victim of such a takedown: the DMCA legislation was designed exactly for it to be used as Mazda and many other use it against individuals and small companies who can’t spend thousands of dollars fighting bogus takedowns.
There are penalties. They require proof of intent, however. So there are no penalties.
Why is there no big alternative hosted outside of the US where your DMCA does not apply?
There are other centralised code hosting services, for example Codeberg, but they are equally scared of any legal action even when it doesn’t directly apply.