Once upon a time, software patents and digital rights were concepts that only mattered to small set of people (relatively speaking). It only affected people who were IT aware, and bought or sold digital media etc.  It didn't seem to affect people like my father, who is computer illiterate.  That is no longer the case.  With the advances in technology in every field imaginable,  there's a microprocessor chip driving everything and software instructions for that microprocessor and here, the companies that churn out these products are taking away the right of the owner of the product to tinker around with the product, using software patents and digital rights as the blocking agent.

Now, when we consider a refrigerator or a television,  they are not really considered user serviceable, at least by a vast majority of people, but what of motor vehicles?  Traditionally,  the more mechanically oriented amongst us have always taken pride in working on their own motor vehicles, but that's slowly getting harder to do, without specialized equipment which is steadily harder to find in the open market.  Now, you can't simply pop the hood and inspect the engine and other components and fix what needs fixing.  Instead, a sensor, having detected a component failure, would have deactivated a circuit and would need software interaction to resolve the issue.  Cars come with a serial port or USB interface into which a specialized and often heavily non-standard equipment needs to be plugged in and the issue tackled.  Unless the issue is cleared from the device, the car will not work, even if the problem itself is rectified.  It's much like the famous printer message 'Paper jam detected; clear jam and press ok to continue'.  Even after the jam itself is cleared, the printer doesn't work, unless you press the 'ok' button.  In cars, this 'ok' button is to be pressed from an external device.  Also, several settings, such as timing values are no longer managed manually, but directly by the Electronic Control Unit (ECU).  People who wished to fix their own cars tried asking the company to sell them the diagnostics unit, but were politely refused. Some enterprising companies started manufacturing and selling reverse engineered units, to interact with these cars, but they have fallen foul of the corporate lawyers employed by these car makers.   Suddenly, it's deemed illegal if you try to fix your own car, because the data about the car's internals is supposedly copyrighted property of the car maker and you aren't authorized to access it! See this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/ford-tries-shut-down-third-party-repair-tool-copyright

This is how insididous and fuzzy software patents and digital rights are.  The above case, if upheld, will make it illegal for anybody other than Ford or its authorized workforce from working on Ford cars, and if that precedent is set, the other vehicle  makers will follow. This has the potential to rob jobs from millions of people who run automobile service centers.  Consider a poor farmer in India who purchases a tractor;  traditionally,  he would either work on it himself or get it worked on by a local mechanic, but this might no longer be possible! For every small issue, he'd have to call in the company technician at an enormous expense.  Is that not a violation of his rights ? It would be fair for a company to void the warranty on the product if it's been worked on by somebody other than a company technician, but an outright ban on non-company personnel from working on it seems overreaching and excessive.