Comment Re:Would you like next door kid reprogram his car? (Score 1) 292
If there's a public safety concern about people hacking code in cars, then copyright is not the way to address it. The purpose of copyrights is purportedly to encourage the production of more works. It is certainly not intended to be a tool for ensuring public safety.
Ideally, hacking safety-related code (and then driving it on a public highway) should be legal only if the hacker got the appropriate certifications to work on that area, along with insurance riders to go with it. This would be completely unrelated to the copyright status of the original code.