In one of the coolest and more outrageous repair stories in quite some time, three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it.
After breaking trains simply because an independent repair shop had worked on them, NEWAG is now demanding that trains fixed by hackers be removed from service.
This is an EU country, not the US.
Things like the DMCA provisions forbidding working around IP protection mechanisms (and software is copyrighted) don’t apply here.
IANAL (so take this it with a pinch), unless the trains are legally theirs rather than the train company’s, it’s not hacking, it’s just “software maintenance” and the only right this company has here is to withdraw product warranties because of “unauthorized changes”.
There might or not be a case against the train company (for example, if the contract forbade this or the train company tried to sell those trains onwards as if they were original) but not against the people who did the software changes on the trains when authorized by the owners of said trains.
I assume EU has safety regulations and if a train suddenly loses its brakes they would be liable wouldn’t they? Now they can say someone has “hacked the train” and they can’t guarantee the brakes will work. I am not sure where the USA argument came from