Toyota Abusing DMCA?

I’m not sure how much stock to put into this article, that comes to you via /. But I will say this much, if this is true, then Toyota are a bunch of A-holes that are not worthy of the admiration of those thousands of folks who put up wallpapers of their Toyotas/Scions/Lexi.

I often have to wonder about the state of the world anymore, where people are constantly being forced to question weather they actually own a thing when they pay money for it, or weather they just own a license to use it. I would have a hard time spending the amount of money that it costs to buy a car, if I couldn’t take pictures of the thing and I couldn’t refer to it by its product name when telling others what I really think about it, and was only allowed to use it for as long as the company felt it was appropriate for me to use it. That would be precisely why I don’t buy songs on iTunes and why I still buy DVDs rather than downloading my video digitally via iTunes or some other service.

If I shell out money for a thing, I should be able to use it on whatever devices I choose, and fangirl about it in whatever way I find to be appropriate as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of the copyright holder. So if I take a picture of a debadged Toyota… okay, you know what, I can see Toyota pitching a beef, especially if I don’t identify the car as being a Toyota. But if I leave the badges in place and say, “This is my corolla!” Toyota needs to shut the hell up and call it free advertising.

If this is for real… the lawyers at Toyota really need to learn a hard lesson about alienating consumers and I’ll never buy Toyota again.