I bet that the goal here is to try to abuse trademark law to sue anyone who makes compatible bits because it’s embedding the trademarked BMW logo. I also bet that courts won’t buy into it.
EDIT: Well, I bet that US courts won’t buy into it. Dunno about other jurisdictions, what case law is there.
Back in the 1990s, you had Sega v. Accolade, where Sega tried making their consoles not work with a game unless that game had copyrighted and trademarked content at the beginning, with the idea that nobody could legally make games compatible with their consoles without Sega’s approval, and a court said “nice try, but no”.
EDIT2:
The court then went on to cite Anti-Monopoly v. General Mills Fun Group, which states in reference to the Lanham Act, “The trademark is misused if it serves to limit competition in the manufacture and sales of a product. That is the special province of the limited monopolies provided pursuant to the patent laws.”[9] The judges in the case had decided that Sega had violated this provision of the act by utilizing its trademark to limit competition for software for its console.
EDIT3: Oh, BMW patented it, too. I still bet that that’s going to run into anti-trust law.
Basically what Nintendo did on one of their schemes to prevent unauthorized software (Famicom Disk System, which was a floppy disk drive for the Japanese version of the NES). This was the physical Nintendo logo embossed on to floppy disk and with a flat disk instead, the disk can’t be physically loaded (sort of, you can add extra cut outs). Other game systems required a logo or similar other brand/trademark/IP to be present in the game code in order to boot, so if you wanted to make your own game without Nintendo’s blessing, you had to invlude their IP in your physical disk or in the game code just to get it to boot. This BMW patent seems to be in the spirit of those hard and software protections that prevent people from doing what they want with the hardware (car) they bought.
I bet that the goal here is to try to abuse trademark law to sue anyone who makes compatible bits because it’s embedding the trademarked BMW logo. I also bet that courts won’t buy into it.
EDIT: Well, I bet that US courts won’t buy into it. Dunno about other jurisdictions, what case law is there.
Back in the 1990s, you had Sega v. Accolade, where Sega tried making their consoles not work with a game unless that game had copyrighted and trademarked content at the beginning, with the idea that nobody could legally make games compatible with their consoles without Sega’s approval, and a court said “nice try, but no”.
EDIT2:
EDIT3: Oh, BMW patented it, too. I still bet that that’s going to run into anti-trust law.
Basically what Nintendo did on one of their schemes to prevent unauthorized software (Famicom Disk System, which was a floppy disk drive for the Japanese version of the NES). This was the physical Nintendo logo embossed on to floppy disk and with a flat disk instead, the disk can’t be physically loaded (sort of, you can add extra cut outs). Other game systems required a logo or similar other brand/trademark/IP to be present in the game code in order to boot, so if you wanted to make your own game without Nintendo’s blessing, you had to invlude their IP in your physical disk or in the game code just to get it to boot. This BMW patent seems to be in the spirit of those hard and software protections that prevent people from doing what they want with the hardware (car) they bought.