It’s a red-letter day for you. Staring in wonderment at that precious title to your new car (well, maybe it’s not so new now) that has taken you 5 years to own. But the car is finally yours, the loan company relinquished their part-ownership when you sent in your last payment. That title is your right of passage into an exclusive club: the ownership society.
Not so fast. That title you worked for five years to obtain doesn’t actually mean you own the car. What it really means is light years away from ownership. Every car company (Tesla is the lone hold-out— electric car anyone?) has a passel of corporate lawyers making the case that while you may drive the car, you certainly don’t own it. The next logical question— if you don’t own it, who does? The car company, of course. The legal “notion” buttressing this extraordinary claim: your car is a vehicle that delivers information which the car companies, who made the car, control and license. The “information” is the software embedded in the vehicle controlling every moving part of the car. Ergo they own the car because they own the software and you drive the car not because you own the car but because they license the software to you giving you the right to drive the car. Got it? No matter what you do, you’ll never own the car. In practical terms, if the car companies ever got around to rigorously enforcing the terms of their license, you could be in for a very expensive ride. That local mechanic that changes your oil and does routine maintenance? No longer permitted. Under the terms of the license, you would be obliged to go to your dealer whose prices would probably violate the laws of gravity.
Who is responsible for this outrage? Hate to tell you folks, but chalk it up to the “feel your pain” President Clinton. In 1998, he signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which had received the support of the usual suspects—your friends in Hollywood, the greedsters in the music industry, and assorted gangsters in the corporate mafia including book publishers. Most if not all of them happened, coincidentally, to be big donors to —you guessed it — the Clinton war chest. The law was presented to Joe and Jane Six Pack as a way to strengthen existing copyright laws. The real reason was the usual reason— to safeguard corporate profits in the face of the internet with its promise of democratizing media. It wasn’t long before the more rapacious corporate types in the auto industry jumped on the bandwagon and realized they could join the party.
Now the race is on to make private property rights go the way of dinosaurs and rotary telephones, starting with that hunk of metal in your garage. It may be small comfort, but it could be worse. You could be a farmer. If you were, your life has just gotten a whole lot more expensive. The John Deere Company, the numero uno manufacturer of tractors, is operating under the novel theory that a farmer buying a John Deere tractor doesn’t own it.
My, my no, as their lawyers informed the Copyright Office, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.” 
Once again, forget about having your local repair shop do routine maintenance or make a minor adjustment. You’re consigned to the “company store” and we all know what that means —sky-high prices and long wait times.
GM makes no bones about the benefits they’re pursuing —ending private property rights, stifling innovation, crushing competition, all in the service of expanding corporate control over your life. We are fast becoming a republic of licensees not owners. Barreling through the exits along with your right to own what you buy is a dramatic shrinking of what used to be the private and public commons.
The veneration of property rights in America is a mixed bag of bad intentions that eventually became a cornerstone of the US democratic republic. The founding fathers, celebrated in story and song, were essentially a bunch of property-owning (including slaves considered property) and property-revering elitists who made sure to protect their right to govern by means of the Constitution. In Article II and an update in the 12th Amendment, the electoral college was created to prevent the non-property owning masses thought to have little stake in the country from electing an unsuitable president. In Article I, the same hubris codified the indirect election of senators —reversed by the 17th amendment.
“The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person. and property and in their management.” That was Thomas Jefferson two hundred years ago. The corporatists and their willing allies in government have put huge chinks in that foundation.
