Having a family owned auto shop, I'll chime in here. I didn't read everything but here is what the facts seem to be: I found it odd that a "part list" is the

Having a family owned auto shop, I'll chime in here. I didn't read everything but here is what the facts seem to be: I found it odd that a "part list" is the root of the issue here since common repair software has lots of "lists" and diagrams. ex: http://www.ondemand5.com/ http://www.ondemand5.com/ yet Ford isn't suing them... The issue seems to be that this company hacked/stole/cracked/reverse engineered Ford's own software and is now giving non public data to the public. You really can't think that this is right... They clearly had to circumvent some kind of encryption. An obvious sign that you shouldn't be doing this... (hence why the encryption is there, no matter how simple) Competition is a big issue in the automotive industry. There will be no "github" for your vehicle. Auto repair and manufacturing is a totally different world. And plus lives are at stake here. You can't have people unofficially getting part specifications and blindly stamping out inferior (and unauthorized) replicas. Protection of IP is a big thing still in many industries. Even at my family's small shop, we get regular calls from people that download $10k auto repair software from bittorrent and call up the shop asking if they can install some "awesome" software for our shop for a low price of $500... There is a lot of money to be made by stealing in the auto industry.