Maybe this is why we can't store music on the hard drive

aviators99 said:

Ford and GM sued for millions over CD-ripping tech in cars - Computerworld

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Whenever some obviously useful thing remains inexplicably unavailable, it's a pretty good bet there's a copyright or patent involved.

Really, it's time to end the concept of intellectual property. It could be justified -- barely -- as "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts" when the US Constitution was drafted. Content was scarce and physically difficult to publish, and there was nothing remotely resembling modern manufacturing. The concept of IP is completely indefensible now, because all it does is get in the way of Progress.

flashflood said:

Whenever some obviously useful thing remains inexplicably unavailable, it's a pretty good bet there's a copyright or patent involved.

Really, it's time to end the concept of intellectual property. It could be justified -- barely -- as "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts" when the US Constitution was drafted. Content was scarce and physically difficult to publish, and there was nothing remotely resembling modern manufacturing. The concept of IP is completely indefensible now, because all it does is get in the way of Progress.

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While I agree it can be obstructive, the concept of protected IP provides assurance that allows companies to invest in complex R&D. In media, IP allows artists to be paid for their efforts beyond live performance. While the current approach to protections has its flaws and is ripe for a re-think, to abolish totally would not enable progress, would actually stifle it.

It would be nice if they enabled the offline mode for Slacker with that extra space. That would alleviate their liability and let us store music locally as well.

Model S doesn't have a CD drive and I don't recall anyone being able to even connect one. On-board file storage in a Tesla is no different to owning/using a USB stick.

It's more likely they picked too small of a drive and found they needed it for maps and other things. They figured with 128GB thumb drives down to less than $50 that was a good way to go too.

dsm363 said:

It's more likely they picked too small of a drive and found they needed it for maps and other things. They figured with 128GB thumb drives down to less than $50 that was a good way to go too.

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OR, if you have a lot of media in FLAC or other uncompressed formats, a 1 TB usb drive for $65. Really, if Tesla enabled the onboard storage, the next line of complaint would be "too little space". I really like the option to be user expandable and "open"... also to be able to take the drive into my house and re-synch with my master collection.

tomas said:

While I agree it can be obstructive, the concept of protected IP provides assurance that allows companies to invest in complex R&D. In media, IP allows artists to be paid for their efforts beyond live performance. While the current approach to protections has its flaws and is ripe for a re-think, to abolish totally would not enable progress, would actually stifle it.

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That is indeed the general justification. One could argue it is still necessary in a few very specialized cases, such as drug discovery.

I commend to your attention a recent Stanford Law paper:

IP in a World Without Scarcity by Mark A. Lemley :: SSRN

Since Tesla doesn't have ripping capability it shouldn't affect it.

The reason not to have music on the hard drive is that you don't need it. What you really need is a fast indexing system and a USB port and Bluetooth. Our Volt has a USB port, but it takes so long to index my wife's old 32GB Zen that my wife just plugs into the Aux port*.

* Side note: thanks to thoughtless design, on the Volt, the stereo's Aux source also acts as a "no music please" setting since you have to have the stereo on to use a paired Bluetooth phone.

Just like the DMCA, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 is bad legislation. The famous Sony Betamax case confirms that I have the right to manipulate content that I've lawfully licensed so that the content is more conveniently available to me. Copying a CD to my thumb drive or to the hard drive in my vehicle makes my lawfully licensed content more convenient.

Thanks to industry pressure (hmm. industry pressure to drive protectionist legislation that infringes on our freedoms. sound familiar?) we have legislation that makes unlawful the devices that are used to perform acts that the supreme court has ruled are lawful.

The DMCA and AHRA are like a law that pays lip service to the 1st Amendment while making owning a printing press unlawful.

aviators99 said:

Whether or not a CD drive exists in the car has nothing material to do with this lawsuit.

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Ok this is probably really stupid of me to argue with a lawyer but.....common sense says it does make a difference since the case is about the ability to rip CDs to the vehicle hard drive; you can't do that in a Tesla because it doesn't have a CD drive.

(I might regret posting this....)

tomas said:

OR, if you have a lot of media in FLAC or other uncompressed formats, a 1 TB usb drive for $65. Really, if Tesla enabled the onboard storage, the next line of complaint would be "too little space". I really like the option to be user expandable and "open"... also to be able to take the drive into my house and re-synch with my master collection.

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I'm with you. But I rarely take out my collection to re-sync, maybe a few times a year -- I wish they'd put a few more powered USB ports somewhere hidden in the back so that we could connect that 1 TB USB drive and leave it there, out of sight and not cluttering up the open feel of the front cabin, leaving the USB ports in the center armrest for passengers to charge their phones and play music they brought along...

I thought it was well known that the space originally intended to be made available for us to copy media to was instead used for map tile caching on the google maps service to improve offline performance.

Perhaps I dreamt that explanation though (my experience in the UK is that map tiles really don't seem to be cached very well at all).

I really can't see why this is an issue. I just bought a very small (physically; it's 64GB in terms of data!) USB3 flash drive and put my entire music collection on that. And even if the car did have built-in storage I would still have needed the flash drive to copy it to the car anyway!

And since the Model S doesn't have the ability to rip purchased media to its internal storage the original lawsuit also seems irrelevant.

Here's my terabyte of onboard storage:


Magic of velcro... no rattle

My last car was a Cadillac with a 40 GB hard drive that I could rip CDs to. I never understood why I would want to sit in my car ripping CDs of music that was already on my iPhone. In the three years I had the car, I only changed the CD in the drive four times since I barely used it.

Yes but its too bad the USB music player is basically useless:

Playing music from USB in the Model S | Tesla Living

You end up having to resort to music over bluetooth from your phone.