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We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

• pragone 12y ago
  Very interesting. I did not know this issue extended all the way to farming equipment. At the same time, I can't say I'm terribly surprised given the state of things currently. Thread hijack: Am I the only one who finds Wired's... "unique"... styling of links absolutely obnoxious?
  • csours 12y ago
    Its coming to consumer vehicles as well. [0] This will be (already is) an industry standard. 0: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/automakers-say-you-dont-really-own-your-car https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/automakers-say-you-don...
  • MrZongle2 12y ago
    In support of your hijacking: no, you're not. I find it annoying. It has the stink of "we've got to do something different but we don't know what...let's mess with something that isn't broken!" As abhorrent as I find John Deere's anti-ownership approach, I say let them continue down that road. It will provide another entrepreneur the opportunity to create and sell a more easily maintainable, you-bought-it-so-you-own-it alternative. God knows the home appliance space needs that kind of alternative.
    • jaegerpicker 12y ago
      Right but the issue with that approach is that the better alternative rarely appears. Your own example of the home appliance shows that.
    • coldpie 12y ago
      And in the meantime, everyone who exists now just gets boned. Sorry, everyone who lives in the present instead of some theoretical future!
    • pdxgene 12y ago
      I'm in violent agreement with you here -- the notion of a smart home platform, for example, that allows me to customize it via an API, or, if I choose, by tinkering with its basic software, sounds awesome to me. But I'm a programmer, and a tinkerer. In order for this to be a viable mainstream reality, some enterprising company will need to establish a platform or system of consumer-grade components that bridges the gap between "general population computer literacy" and "ability to tweak one's electronic things". In reality, that may be (for now) an unbridgeable gap. Maybe the only route to digital freedom is deeper digital literacy on the part of the average consumer. But one thing is for sure -- as long as laws like the DMCA are in place, the deck is stacked against evolution towards DIY utopia.
  • kwiens 12y ago
    The internet of things means this issue is coming to every single product in the world. If it's possible to add electronics to it, it will have a chip. And that means that software IP rules now apply to hardware. Those rules need changing. It's more urgent with physical products than with traditional software because tractors need repair on a regular basis. Copyright is taking away the independence of farmers.
  • c_ehlen 12y ago
    > I did not know this issue extended all the way to farming equipment. It's not just farming equipment. The heavy equipment industry uses closed and highly protected diagnostics tools. They don't want to give the control of the internal of the machine away to the customer.
• chainsaw10 12y ago
  I am not a lawyer, so I'm probably wrong on some of the finer points here, but I'm going to postulate an analogy here. Why can't we equate the software inside a computer inside a vehicle with the mechanical equivalent? What then would our rights be? It obviously doesn't require permission to move a valve or a gear around. Therefore, it shouldn't require permission to move a few bits. It also doesn't require permission to draw a diagram of your changes and tell your neighbor what you did. On the further extreme, one could potentially draw a diagram of the entire vehicle. At some point you're copying the entire idea, and the lawyers can fill in how this is protected. In this analogy, the computer code replacing it should then be protected the same way?
  • sanderjd 12y ago
    I always wonder whether the legal framework for software has ended up different than other things because of its fundamental differences, or whether it's because it was invented in a different era. Is it software that is different or is it the modern legal structure that is different?
    • cylinder 12y ago
      Nothing has changed, licenses have always been in the law.
      • TheCoelacanth 12y ago
        Always? I don't think so. Copyright is a few hundred years old at most.
        • cylinder 12y ago
          License predates copyright.
      • sanderjd 12y ago
        Probably wasn't very clear – I wasn't trying to say anything about actual legal changes (although that's interesting too), I was wondering if instead legal culture has changed. I'm wondering if there's any fundamental difference between machines and software that causes the former to be predominantly owned while the latter is predominantly licensed, or whether it is instead because software is coming of age in a different legal and/or political and/or economic ecosystem. Or perhaps machinery went through a similar phase where licenses were more common – I have no idea if that's the case, and I'm curious to know.
• Lawtonfogle 12y ago
  Why can't we simply ask if this could be done for 'mechanical programming' and apply the same logic. You don't own that full mechanical engine's construction, you just have a license to use it for the lifetime of the vehicle. If that wouldn't stand, then how is it any different than code except that code is on a much smaller and and more detailed level. At the end of the day, it is still physical components following the laws of physics to render some result. Does the fact it is more complicated allow for it to stand? In which case, how complex when the fully mechanical engine need to become for the same logic to be applied?
  • bsimpson 12y ago
    The intangibility of code makes the marginal cost of a copy $0, which in turn raises the spectre of copyright law. You can't copy an engine made of steel, so copyright law is moot.
    • userbinator 12y ago
      You can't copy an engine made of steel, so copyright law is moot. That's an interesting point, because you can literally build a copy of substantial portions of a car (engine, transmission, axles, brakes, etc.) from entirely aftermarket parts, for certain popular components. Many of these parts don't make any claims about licensing the designs from the original company but they do claim "drop-in" compatibility.
    • Lawtonfogle 12y ago
      But you can. The cost is higher, but you can make a copy. So if the cost is really small (not $0, but small) it changes? Also to note, in these cases, we are talking about both the code and the rest of the machine. Is this to say that if any part of the machine can be copied for close to $0, we can remove ownership? Any single piece of that engine can be easily and cheaply copied, so once again, why the difference?
      • bsimpson 12y ago
        Copyright law is an exception. The laws of the physical world mean that, if you give/sell an object to another party, you no longer have access to it yourself. This is where concepts like the first sale doctrine come into play - it's your one tangible thing, and you can do with it whatever you like. You control that one, and only that one, instance of the thing. Intangibles can be given/sold to another party without relinquishing your use of the original (because copies are free). You can buy one CD and gives copies of the music on it to 1,000,000 people without cost, and without giving up your right to the original. Even if you could copy an engine for relatively cheaply, the same economics do not apply. Therefore, an exception exists to our physical property laws to cover this edge case: copyright law. As userbinator notes, there are other areas of intellectual property law that may apply to physical goods (e.g. patents), but you asked what the difference is between digital programming and mechanical: the difference is that digital programming is intangible, so it can be copied ad naseum, so the ownership exception we call copyright law applies.
• skywhopper 12y ago
  If Deere and GM prevail, then we need to change the laws to recognize that these vehicles aren't being purchased, but leased. There are accounting and tax implications for the lessor and the lessee that need to be resolved.
  • 6stringmerc 12y ago
    Also, due to the notion that is being put forward that the reason for this distinction is for safety then all maintenance liabilities for the life-span of the vehicle should rest with the manufacturer. That means all fluids, wipers, brake pads, tires, emissions equipment...I'd like to see that condition tacked on.
    • brudgers 12y ago
      Triple Net leases in real estate are an example of well established precedent contrary to the belief you are expressing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_net_lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_net_lease
      • 6stringmerc 12y ago
        Okay, but when's the last time a piece of real estate ran over a child? I'm being a bit drastic, sure, but we're talking about a mobile, several thousand pound object. As your link shows, the notion of casaulty with respect to liability still engages the owner / lessor with obligations with respect to legal standards. The NNN lease may exist, but it's not a very palatable notion, IMO, especially when applied to something like a vehicle.
        • praneshp 12y ago
          A running over a child equivalent would be falling down unexpectedly or a small portion caving in. When I was 7, all the bricks in one corner of the kitchen fell down. Just randomly (probably decaying, but unnoticed because of the paint) The lady taking care of me was less than 5 feet away.
• mromanuk 12y ago
  This is boring, these guys are talking about software that existed (briefly) between the 80s-90s before the open source era. All this make the necessity of a stronger open source hardware. At least the automakers should let you replace their SW stack with an open source alternative.
• briantakita 12y ago
  > John Deere may be out of touch, but it’s not alone. Other corporations, including trade groups representing nearly every major automaker, made the same case to the Copyright Office again and again. In Capitalism, the game is to make monetary profit & control the market, above all else. It makes sense what John Deere is doing. They are just being good Capitalists.
  • tacos 12y ago
    They're also a great fucking company. Nerds care about this sort of bullshit. People who turn seeds into fruit into dollars care that the manufacturer will drop in with a helicopter to a field and get you going fast with a loaner part the size of your entire cubicle. They also have interesting jobs available on their test farm for software engineers.
  • PythonicAlpha 12y ago
    > the game is to make monetary profit & control the market What you describe, basically is monopolism. It is well known, that monopolies are killing a free market. > They are just being good Capitalists. When this is true, than something is very wrong with Capitalism itself.
    • briantakita 12y ago
      > It is well known, that monopolies are killing a free market. In ecology, there's a concept call Ecological Succession. Likewise, in Capitalism, the free market is a stage in a succession toward monopoly. Capital tends to pool, leading to monopolies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession
      • PythonicAlpha 12y ago
        Applying concepts from one scientific discipline to other disciplines does seldom fit. I think it is more a sign of pseudo-scientific trickery to back the own thinking, that is most often used in unsound economical theories. It is a fact, that while monopolies are good for the monopolists, it is bad for societies at large. And no "ecological" concepts can convince me from the opposite. One example: While bigger banks are good for the bankers, because countries have to rescue them, it is very bad for those countries, as everybody (except politicians) can see since 2008. With your "ecological" theory, someone also could argue, that dinosaurs are better than mammals.
• JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Huh. So, like an iPhone, you don't get to see or modify the software on a tractor. What's new about that? Its the same with my desktop computer, come to think of it.
  • jasonlotito 12y ago
    Are you saying you can't install the software you want on your computer? You can't replace the OS? Are you suggesting that this should be acceptable?
    • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      No, just the part about not allowed to modify nor even examine the code on my computer, that is under license. As for the iPhone, I think the way it works is definitely not acceptable.
    • maxerickson 12y ago
      I don't think people should accept it, but I'm not hugely convinced that it should be enforced by the government. Assume that John Deere has good analytics about the things that impact the TCO of these super tractors. Assume that some sensors are very effective at lowering that TCO. Assume that John Deere puts interlocks into the vehicle and prices it competitively based on the calculated assumption that those interlocks will lower their warranty costs. Why should I have to pay extra so that you can have the freedom to hack your tractor?
• Loughla 12y ago
  The people who have the money to buy the mega-tractors you see in the article don't care. That's why, unless someone outside the industry makes a stink, nothing will happen. These are giga-corporations who are 'family owned' in name only. If they don't rent, they operate that machine for a few years, play the tax game, and trade it even-money for a new one. To them, ownership doesn't matter. Their service contracts with implement dealers let them not worry about who owns what. All they care about is whether or not it works. (Off topic now) Between this and the stupidly high price for land, it's small farmers who are getting left in the dust. I say this in every thread related to farming; I am in my early 30's and I guarantee I live to see the death of the actual family farm.
  • beat 12y ago
    It's not just mega-tractors that are software-controlled these days. It's all tractors. Including those used by "small family farms".
    • Loughla 12y ago
      I understand that. It's not just tractors either, it's every implement from planters to bailers to rippers, discs and plows. Everything is chipped and controlled from the main-screen in the cab. But the individuals who have the power, money, and influence to do actually change anything are the large-scale farmers. They are not invested in changing the system; it works for them.
    • briantakita 12y ago
      Perennial polyculture food forests reduces the advantage of high tech equipment. Nature does the work of growing. Replanting is rare. Harvesting is more of a manual process.
      • bryanlarsen 12y ago
        Polyculture farming may be the next big thing in farming, enabled by machine vision automated systems. A typical small farmer in Saskatchewan can harvest 100-200 acres of wheat by himself on a single day using a modern combine harvester. Manual harvesting is not an option.
• brlewis 12y ago
  The company argues that allowing people to alter the software—even for the purpose of repair—would “make it possible for pirates, third-party developers, and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software.” Next step: weld the hood shut so competitors can't see the parts.
  • pdxgene 12y ago
    The label "no user-serviceable parts inside" springs to mind...
• jokoon 12y ago
  Come to think of it, linux and gnu don't come from the US. So isn't open source bad for the US economy ?
  • unwind 12y ago
    Linus is from Finland, but of course RMS is from the US. So you're right, and wrong. :)
    • bsimpson 12y ago
      And he lives in Portland.
    • jokoon 12y ago
      I thought RMS came from oxford...
• jaegerpicker 12y ago
  Articles like this always push me towards the Stallman way of thinking that all software should be open source and everyone should have the right to modify/fix/change the software in any way they see fit as long as they aren't trying to resell it as their own work. It's a tough subject, I make an extraordinarily good living from writing closed source software but I constantly feel as though I should support open source software more.
• petercooper 12y ago
  Well that's fine. You license me the tractor for $X per month and let me cancel that license and return it on a reasonable period of notice, and you have a deal. If you're going to license things, you can sell licenses, but if you're going to sell an object, I own the object.
  • notahacker 12y ago
    I'm not sure that legal innovation obliging people to pay monthly for everything that comes with a EULA is really the most consumer-friendly way forward here...
• dto-games 12y ago
  The way to end this nonsense is to write and distribute a worm that bricks every single iDevice on Earth.
  • allannienhuis 12y ago
    No, the way to end it is to build an alternative that is better in the eyes of the people willing to pay money for the devices. Spend your energy on building something rather than tearing down.
    • twobits 12y ago
      In that case, there would never have been war. What you say, is the "correct" solution. The good, the improving, what helps society. I agree with you. But it's slow, fragile, and you should acknowledge that your established, strong, opposition, may play dirty.
• fsloth 12y ago
  Funny, when DRM first came on the radar over a decade ago enlightened individuals noted that the same principles of deny-of-ownership could be extended to physical objects ... precisely in the way described on this article.
  • dboyd 12y ago
    This was my first thought as well. Why is it that people have no issue with your laptop vendor "claiming ownership" of your laptop, but are so alarmed when the same principle is applied to a larger machine? Yes, I realize that this is not an entirely fair comparison. However, the parallels between this article and the "war on general purpose computing" seem relevant... http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
• derpleplex 12y ago
  > GM went so far as to argue locking people out helps innovation. That’s like saying locking up books will inspire kids to be innovative writers, because they won’t be tempted to copy passages from a Hemingway novel. This is one of the best analogies I've heard.
• paulornothing 12y ago
  This article is really interesting to me as I just bought a John Deere (sure it is just a lawn tractor). During the course of the sale I was chatting with the salesman about their larger agriculture tractors as this store mostly does sales for farmers. He informed me about all the technological advances, soil sampling they do and data they collect and give to the farmer. Then the farmer can load this in their tractor and the sprayer or whatever attachment they are using can adapt based on the gps coordinates. So a previously identified area can be treated with a different mixture on the fly and the farmer does nothing but ride along. The article mentions that farmers are opting for non-software based vehicles. However from the way things seemed when I spoke with the salesman it is the very opposite.
  • Loughla 12y ago
    It is fantastic to watch. Custom farming was the wave of the future in the early 2000's, when you had to have special equipment to do it. Now anyone can do it themselves with this equipment. You can spot apply chemicals and fertilizer, reducing cost and environmental impact. There is a literal overhead map with red-zones, for when you get bored and want to watch something. Combine this technology with gps guided auto-steer, and the machine operator becomes a bag of meat sitting there to turn it on and off as needed. I have a long-time friend who does custom farming. He's really good on his PSP and Gameboy something-or-other. As for "However from the way things seemed when I spoke with the salesman it is the very opposite." That's a salesman. He wants to sell whatever he has; if he had old equipment, the market would be swinging that way if you asked him. His impression will always be that people want what he's selling. . . .
• jkot 12y ago
  Article is just wrong. One does not own software on device he buys. Software ownership means that one can issue new licenses, which is clearly not a case here. One can not just start selling Windows, because he bought laptop where they are installed. You just get license to use software. But other side is customer protection. One buys tractor with expectation to be able to fix it and modify it. If that is not true, John Deere is selling broken stuff, and customers should get their money back.
  • vonmoltke 12y ago
    > Article is just wrong. One does not own software on device he buys. Software ownership means that one can issue new licenses, which is clearly not a case here. One can not just start selling Windows, because he bought laptop where they are installed. You just get license to use software. This idea needs to die. Copyright ownership means that one can make and distribute copies of software. Software ownership means you own one or more copies, which you should be able to with as you wish within the bounds of copyright law. You do not need a license to use a book; you do to copy it. Software should be the same, and that companies like Deere, GM, and 8,476 software companies are trying to assert the validity of this "license to use" is a perversion of copyright law.
    • AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      Exactly. If I buy a book, I can write on the pages. I can fold, spindle, and mutilate. I can rip out a page. I own that book. I can't sell a copy, though - not even a copy of my modified, ripped up version. Not without a license from the author/publisher of the original.
      • rhino369 12y ago
        John Deere would say that you can reflash, smash, or replace the eeeprom if you want. But you can't create a new piece of software based on the old one. I think you should be able too, because what is the harm, but I don't think the book analogy holds. You aren't allowed to rewrite a book, even if you keep the copy yourself.
• rimantas 12y ago
  Why do you think that the very idea of ownership is so good?
  • AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    The abstract answer: Legally enforceable protection for private property turns out to have some significant benefits for a society. It helps society develop past the warlord stage. The concrete answer: The article gives some ways that the John Deere idea is bad. In particular, a tractor isn't just a thing that I buy. It's a tool, and I need it to work so that I can plant and harvest my crops. This "ownership" question isn't just a matter of me strutting around announcing to the world that I own it. The question is whether I have the right to repair it in order to get it back to work, or whether I have to wait for the authorized person to do the work.
    • twobits 12y ago
      "The article gives some ways that the John Deere idea is bad." "Bad", is relative. "Bad" for whom? Deere or the farmer? Follow the money / power.
• fsloth 12y ago
  Open source answer is:http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ (I'm not saying it's a viable answer at this point but the work they are doing is intrguing.)
  • jackreichert 12y ago
    It's really just a matter of time until such manufacturing has a viable open source mainstream alternative. Then we can look forward to small dev shops building affordable custom robots for everyday use.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
      "Affordable" and "custom" tend to not go hand in hand. There are many people building tractors from scratch right now, just hop on YouTube for a look. Want a custom accounting package for your small business? I'll build you a simple one for $30,000. In the meantime, you can go buy QuickBooks for $199 right off Intuit's site.
• sologoub 12y ago
  An earlier article did a much better job layout why this is a huge problem for independent farmers: "The family farmer who owns this tractor is a friend of mine. He just wanted a better way to fix a minor hydraulic sensor. Every time the sensor blew, the onboard computer would shut the tractor down. It takes a technician at least two days to order the part, get out to the farm, and swap out the sensor. So for two days, Dave’s tractor lies fallow. And so do his fields. Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave’s sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor’s highly proprietary computer system—the tractor’s engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast." Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/new-high-tech-farm-equipment-nightmare-farmers/ http://www.wired.com/2015/02/new-high-tech-farm-equipment-ni... So basically, the concerns are very reasonable - operations cannot rely on systems that are put out of commission without a way to fix relatively minor issues on the spot. While the system is trying to protect the farmer for liability purposes, if that farmer overrides the safe guard, liability shifts. The choice should be with the farmer and not John Deere lawyers.
  • Shivetya 12y ago
    People have been doing this years with lawn mowers, both push and riding, for as long as I can remember. The complexity of work require to skirt the system increases but the reasons never really change. If the system is so unreliable there are many other farm tractor manufacturers who can step in and likely are already exploiting the issues John Deere has. If anything, perhaps lemon laws could be applied to farm machinery and written to be as X number of days across a calendar year. the nice thing about farming today is your likely to have online resources, places where word of this problem can travel fast enough to make a manufacture take notice
    • betenoire 12y ago
      grew up urban, married a farmer... learned everything I know (not much) about fixing things with spit tape and wire from them. what you say makes sense, but meanwhile Dave is still standing in his field with a useless machine and lots of work to do.
• briantakita 12y ago
  Here's a plug for Open Source Ecology. One of their designs is for an Open Source tractor, made from inexpensive commodity parts. The advantage is the plans are open & maintenance is also open. http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
• apricot 12y ago
  Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights. As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them. When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms. I remember reading Stallman's short story "The Right to Read" in the 1990s. I found it alarmist and completely unrealistic. I read it today and am forced to recognize that Stallman was exactly right.
  • fweespeech 12y ago
    Some of us just don't buy DRM books and make copies for personal archival purposes.
  • sker 12y ago
    What happens when we have computers implanted in our brains? Do I no longer own my brain?
    • jellicle 12y ago
      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/
    • aeturnum 12y ago
      "Metabolic control. Enhanced sensory perception. Improved reflexes and muscle capacity. Vastly increased data processing speed and capacity. All improvements thanks to our cyber-brains and cyborg bodies. So what if we can't live without high-level maintenance? We have nothing to complain about. It doesn't mean we've sold our souls to Section 9. We do have the right to resign if we choose. Provided we give the government back our cyborg shells and the memories they hold. " - Ghost In The Shell (1995) Script
      • simplemath 12y ago
        Such a great movie.
• brudgers 12y ago
  [IANAL] The big play isn't about ownership. It's about liability. If you own the tractor and something bad happens, it's product liability. Our intuitions of responsibility go back to the Code of Hammurabi. If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. If you license the tractor, well that's not quite so intuitive and there's lots of room to argue over the terms of the license rather than the arguing over legal precedent.
  • cylinder 12y ago
    Ownership vs license doesn't really have much to do with negligence/torts
    • brudgers 12y ago
      [IANAL] It does in regard to who can have standing. A license can prohibit transfer to a third party by the purchaser. A license also moves what is provided from product toward service and consequently from defects toward errors and omissions. The applicable case law is different. The applicable statutes are different. People can't usually sue Microsoft every time Windows crashes.
• rayiner 12y ago
  I don't see how this is different than anything else software-driven. I "own" my iPhone, but I don't "own" iOS--I just have an implied license to use iOS with the phone.
  • randomdata 12y ago
    Fundamentally there may be little difference, but there are definitely cultural differences. Every farm has a repair shop. While some HN readers might also try to fix their cell phones, the vast majority of the population are not comfortable with that idea in the first place. In fact, telephones were typically the property of the telephone company back in the day, so there has never really been an expectation of being able to fix your own phone. Having farm equipment that you cannot repair yourself is a significant deviation away from the status quo. Farm equipment breaks down frequently - more frequently than you might even imagine - so not being able to repair said equipment does raise alarms for some people. For field crops, you often only have a window of days to plant/harvest, so downtime can cost a fortune.
  • xenophonf 12y ago
    > implied license to use iOS The license isn't implied. It's right there in the EULA to which you agreed when you opened the box and turned the phone on for the first time.
  • JustSomeNobody 12y ago
    If I own my phone (Android), why am I not "allowed" to install AOSP on it? I can install Ubuntu on an HP laptop, why can't I install a ROM on my phone? It's all B.S.
  • nate_meurer 12y ago
    You've missed the point, and erected a strawman in the process. No one claims to "own" John Deere's software. No one is claiming the right to redistribution. This fight is about the legal restraints preventing the owner of the equipment from modifying or repairing it.
• tomswartz07 12y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, and I have a fairly pedestrian grasp of the DMCA. My understanding is that the law, created in the Internet's infancy, is meant to protect and prevent direct copyright infringment. Can anyone explain why they're allowed to (seemingly) abuse this act? They're not selling pirated copies of the tractor control software?
  • Nursie 12y ago
    Under the DMCA anyone breaking a digital lock, no matter how trivial it is, has broken the law, regardless of whether the sell their results. For a good example of how it has been abused in the past, look up Lexmark and how they tried to use crypto code to lock out competitors from providing third-party ink refills. I'm not sure what the eventual outcome was there.
    • userbinator 12y ago
      Fortunately Lexmark lost that one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v._Static_Control_Components,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v._....
  • twobits 12y ago
    "Can anyone explain why they're allowed to (seemingly) abuse this act?" Simple. It's not being abused. It's working as intended.
• enlightenedfool 12y ago
  "He’s not alone: many farmers are opting for older, computer-free equipment." What's the percentage? That's actually the solution and it can extend to any device. Unfortunately, a majority of users don't seem to care. We can refuse to buy music, iPhones etc so we can force them to not do these nasty things, but the technology is irresistable and government(people) more often than not sides with corporations.
• typedef_struct 12y ago
  I understand the outrage, but soon enough they'll just move the software to the cloud and then they'll really own it.
• potatoman2 12y ago
  If there's a demand for unlocked tractors, wouldn't some company somewhere grow to fill that demand? Or is the tractor world an anti-competitive monopoly?
• pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
  90% of john deere tractors are subsidized through farm grants, so, really, the taxpayers own most of the tractors. the farmers are just our slaves.
• fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  The USPTO is currently taking "reply" comments on this very matter (and other similar matters) http://copyright.gov/1201/ http://copyright.gov/1201/ Proposed exemptions: http://copyright.gov/1201/docs/list-proposed-classes-1201.pdf http://copyright.gov/1201/docs/list-proposed-classes-1201.pd... The initial comment period has lapsed. (Reply Comment Period Closes May 1, 2015) >>USPTO Solicitation for comments on proposed rulemaking: >>Section 1201 Exemptions to Prohibition Against Circumvention of Technological Measures Protecting Copyrighted Works: Second Round of Comments >>The comments below were filed by parties who oppose the adoption of a proposed exemption. The initial round of comments were filed by proponents and other members of the public who support the adoption of a proposed exemption, as well as parties that neither support nor oppose an exemption. http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/ http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/ >Due Dates for Public Comments and Associated Evidence >The first round of public comment closed on February 6, 2015, and was limited to submissions from the proponents (i.e., those parties who proposed exemptions during the petition phase) and other members of the public who support the adoption of a proposed exemption, as well as any members of the public who neither support nor oppose an exemption but seek only to share pertinent information about a specific proposal. Any associated documentary and/or multimedia evidence was due by this date. >The second round of public comment closes on March 27, 2015, and will be limited to members of the public who oppose an exemption. Opponents should present the full legal and evidentiary basis for their opposition. Any associated documentary and/or multimedia evidence must also be submitted by this date. >The third round of public comment closes on May 1, 2015, and will be limited to proponents and supporters of particular proposals, and those who neither support nor oppose a proposal, in either case who seek to reply to points made in the earlier rounds of comments. Reply comments should not raise new matters, but instead be limited to addressing arguments and evidence presented by others. Any associated documentary and/or multimedia evidence must also be submitted by this date.
• dataker 12y ago
  Sorry if it upsets people, but Ownership has been gradually been destroyed over the years and this is just another example. I could go on a Libertarian rant, but I'm sure you've already heard about cars being raided without a reason or private data being exposed. Sad to live in a world like this.
  • rhino369 12y ago
    It isn't really gradual. Real estate has traditionally allowed for restrictions on property. You can sell your House with a condition that if the person ever builds a fence. Hell, whole neighborhoods had restrictions on selling to black people. If you own a condo, there are tons of restrictions on it.
• belorn 12y ago
  I don't understand how the concept of EULA's and licenses bundled with physical products you buy can cooperate with the legal concept of fit-for-purpose. If I go to the store, see advertisement or get a sale description of a thing and then buy it, shouldn't the thing then be usable without having to go through a second agreement at some late date? From a consumer protection side, it sound obvious that whatever the deal is between buyer and seller, it should be made clear at the point of purchase. If you can't use the machine, the car, the ithingy without being limited by a untold second contract, then its not fit for purpose and should not be sold. Worse, from a market perspective, tricking customer in this way makes for broken competition and horrible incentives. Any companies that do not use DRM and licenses to limit unofficial repair parts and similar consumables goods will loose to those who permits its. The more you can trick the consumer, the more you can earn money on products after sale, money which the competition has to earn by making a more expensive competitive product.
• Bouncingsoul1 12y ago
  I wonder what we would found if we got a look into the source of these systems. As far as I know BMW's software heavily depends on Free/Open Source Software and for the other'S since we are in the embeded enviroment I could imagine the same. Would make my day if these companies would suddenly get the tables turned and instead of Copyright it would be a Copyleft issue.
• vfrogger 12y ago
  I noticed a different flavor of this same logic with edited DVD's back in the 2000's. In Utah, there was a thriving edited DVD rental business during this time. Essentially, Mom and Pop shops would buy a DVD, take out the sex, language, and violence, and rent the edited version. Hollywood complained that these companies were illegally making copies, so the mom and pop rental stores started to include the original copy as well with the edited copy, to prove that they were not making illegal copies. Ultimately, all of these companies were put out of business because the courts ruled that just because you bought a DVD, you don't have the rights to modify it because it causes "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies". I find it interesting that the issue was harming the creative artistic expression, not financial at all, since, they were not pirating the films, so in truth, Hollywood was selling more DVD's since people who wouldn't normally watch a movie with 75 f-words in it, might actually watch the edited version. Of course, in today's world, there's not many products that we can buy that did not have artistic expression involved in building that product. My house was artistically designed by an architect, if I don't like the kitchen, would I offend his artistic expression by remodeling? My phone was definitely "designed", but maybe I don't like showing off the apple logo on the back, so I put a cover on it, am I offending the artistic expression? If I'm not able to modify a product, do I really own it at all?
  • pluma 12y ago
    > My house was artistically designed by an architect, if I don't like the kitchen, would I offend his artistic expression by remodeling? Depends on the contract you signed. I'm not sure how this applies to private homes or the US, but I recall architects preventing functional modifications of public structures in several cases in Germany. Also, copyright also covers architecture (and also, look up the legal situation of taking pictures of the Eiffel tower at night for a laugh). > do I really own it at all? Again, depending on the legislature, no you don't. And because Americans value their freedom so much, you also have the freedom to cut down your basic rights by entering into a contract. In other countries the nanny state protects us from doing that, preventing the free enterprise from creating a situation where you might have to do so involuntarily (e.g. if you need a phone and all phone contracts are ridiculous).
• brento 12y ago
  (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
• mcguire 12y ago
  As an aside, this is not the first round of this particular fight, and it has been won by consumers before. See the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act[1], for example. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
• kenrikm 12y ago
  It's pretty clear to me what a reasonable solution to this would be. If you buy a laptop you don't "own" the OS you have a license to it and you can install another OS on it you just won't be able to get tech support for the non-standard OS. If you buy a tractor you should be able to do the same and the manufacturer should be required to provide enough information about the hardware systems and their functions that if someone wants to write a open source tractor OS they could. (Think DDWRT, for Tractors)
• slg 12y ago
  I think it is interesting to frame this debate in terms of the near future of self driving cars. The true benefit of those cars will only be realized when they dominate the road and can freely communicate with each other. That could lead to crazy things like stop lights and stop signs disappearing and cars flying through intersections at nearly full speed. But what happens when individual owners start altering the software of these machines? Let's say they "overclock" their speed to travel at 105% of "normal". That would put not only themselves, but everyone on the road at risk. It would threaten to prevent the whole system from realizing its potential. Should that person still have the right to alter the car they own? I simply don't know.
  • nfriedly 12y ago
    The article touches on that a bit and the point they make is that speeding and changing emissions settings are already illegal and we already have enforcement agencies in place. So additional copyright-based restrictions don't make a lot of sense here. I'd also point out that driving on public roads is a licensed privilege (at least in the USA) - so it is conceivable that a car owner could loose the rights to drive their vehicle on public roads (potentially putting others at risk) with out loosing the rights to modify their vehicle.
• Thiz 12y ago
  The only reasonable way to stop that is do not buy shit from them. I had an HP printer that wouldn't run if the ink cartridge wasn't original HP, which are expensive as hell, so I dumped it and never bought HP again. Now Epson is selling printers with refillable cartridges. Guess who's gonna get my money if I ever need a printer again? Free market in action.
• venomsnake 12y ago
  Here is a simple solution. Licence of software gives you the right to reverse engineer and modify it for your use, but not distribute copies of it. You sell software in US - you are mandated to give your customer that rights.
• declan 12y ago
  The linked article is good as far as it goes, but it fails to take the next logical step and call for the simple repeal of the anti-circumvention section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today. It was sold to Congress as a non-controversial way to implement a pair of (yawn) WIPO Copyright Treaties. The DMCA was approved unanimously in the Senate and by a process reserved for non-controversial legislation in the House; there was not even a recorded vote. This is federal law as buggy and outdated code, which is badly in need of refactoring. I wrote about a proposed law to defang the DMCA back in 2003, once some of the 1201 problems became clear: http://news.cnet.com/Congress-mulls-revisions-to-DMCA/2100-1025_3-5211674.html http://news.cnet.com/Congress-mulls-revisions-to-DMCA/2100-1... But because of the influence of the copyright lobby, no amendments have ever succeeded. I wrote more about a better way to approach 1201 and, more broadly, federal DRM policy in this law review article here: http://mccullagh.org/misc/articles/michigan.state.drm.0605.pdf http://mccullagh.org/misc/articles/michigan.state.drm.0605.p... While letting people know about John Deere's comments to the Copyright Office is great, the only reason the Copyright Office has a role here is that 1201 authorizes them to set exemptions. But why should we have to beg the Feds for exemptions when the underlying logic of 1201 is suspect? At the very least 1201 deserves to be debated in Congress with an understanding of what it actually does and how it affects modern technology. When it was introduced 18 years ago, nobody could have known, and that debate has never happened.
  • bsder 12y ago
    > I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today. I shake my head at this. Everybody in tech with 2 brain cells predicted this. The DMCA isn't buggy. It is functioning precisely as designed--protecting big businesses.
    • declan 12y ago
      >Everybody in tech with 2 brain cells predicted this. Cite, please? Claiming, somewhat rudely, that was the case doesn't make it true. If you were prescient enough to publicly criticize the anti-circumvention sections of the DMCA in 1996-1997, you were virtually alone. The lone voices of criticism I remember came from the American Library Association and American University's Peter Jaszi. By 2000 or so, sure, some people had realized the problems, but what I'm talking about is what happened before 1201 became law. Here's one example: the DMCA was approved by both chambers of Congress and became law in October 1998. EFF's home page in October 1998 doesn't even mention the votes or the DMCA at all: https://web.archive.org/web/19981201054106/http://www2.eff.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981201054106/http://www2.eff.o... Of course, the EFF has arguably done more than any other single group to fix DMCA 1201 since then. But, again, I'm talking about when the legislation was still in Congress.
• nnf 12y ago
  Is this really the will of John Deere, or just that of its corporate lawyers coming up with something new to justify their own continued employment? This is not a defense of John Deere or any other corporation that twists the law in ridiculous ways in their favor, but a genuine question. If you could pin down a higher-up at one of these places to find out what they really think, and ask whether this approach is actually good for their company, would anyone besides the lawyers say "yes"?
• lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Looks like a perfect time for someone to open a nice tractor business. There is lots of money in tractors and while it takes a lot more than making a new iphone app, it certainly is less effort than floating cities or going to mars, which on here are propositions that are regularly treated seriously.
• throwawaykwik 12y ago
  throwaway account Introducing Tesla Electric Tractor Co.
• fixxer 12y ago
  This is what happens when lawyers run your company. I was funded out of a John Deere Technology Innovation Center (JDTIC) during my PhD. Their approach to data was what ultimately pushed me to quit the program and go back to work. Everything was priceless and proprietary, yet nothing ever was done with it. They insisted all research conducted by students was performed on their computers, which in itself was only annoying. The part that killed it (in addition to the promise of field data that never came after several years on the project) was that every library installed had to be approved by their IT security team. I kid you not: the datetime library in Perl was not allowed. On the upside, quitting the PhD has been an awesome decision, so I guess I should thank them.
• larrys 12y ago
  Side issue parent article claims that passages can't be copied because the pdf is locked. Other than workarounds to that (I don't know any but I am sure they exist) you could simply run OCR on screengrabs of the pages using something like adobe acrobat or similar.
• grellas 12y ago
  In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.” It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it. I don't have any sympathy for what John Deere is trying to to in using the DMCA to restrict how people repair their own tractors. But the legal issues need to be better delineated than this article attempts to do. 1. John Deere does not "own" your tractor when you buy it from them and it is not asserting that it does. Software is automatically protected by copyright. It is a tangible form of expression of something that is creative and, the way copyright law works, a developer of software does not need to do anything except his normal work in order to gain copyright protection. You code it, you own it. That is the default. If you code it while being paid by someone else as his employee hired to invent, then that someone else owns it. Or if you code it as a work for hire paid by someone else, again, that someone else owns it. The situations vary. But, almost universally, for commercial, proprietary software, the customer almost never owns the software he uses when buying and operating a piece of hardware operated by that software. We all take this for granted when we buy a computer or mobile device. We own the hardware but not the software. We license the software and that is it. That license gives us a right to use the software for its intended purposes but it is almost invariably accompanied by terms that restrict us as consumers from reverse engineering the code or otherwise using the code for any purpose beyond the limited scope of what the license itself allows. For example, we cannot reverse engineer the software to attempt to create a competitive form of software product. People may have philosophical objections to this - usually falling under the "all information ought to be free" rubric - but, unless and until that philosophy prevails and works to change the law, that is by no means what the law is today. Today, when you have commercial software, you have copyright protection and hence a lack of ability to use or do anything else with that software without the permission of the copyright holder. And that means a license. 2. What John Deere is doing with its tractors is not claiming ownership of them once you buy them. Just as when you buy a Mac, Apple is telling you, you own the hardware and you have a license to use the software during the life of the product, so too John Deere is saying the same thing with its tractors. You own the tractor and you can do what you want with it until the product dies but, in once it dies, you have no further license to use the software on anything else besides that product. That is the legal effect of what a license does. There is nothing whatever controversial about this unless you have a philosophical resistance to the very idea of copyright (I realize many people do, of course). Under the law, however, John Deere is claiming nothing more here than what every computer manufacturer has claimed since the beginning of modern computing. To say, as this article does, that John Deere is claiming to own your tractor is wrong. Since the author is hardly ignorant of this, it seems the above statement is inserted for emotional effect and not as part of any reasoned argument. 3. All that said, copyright law is not absolute and never has been. When one gets a copyright, it is time-limited (or at least should be, notwithstanding the absurdly long extensions granted in recent years under the Bono Act, etc.). It also is not absolute even while the rights exist. The huge category limiting its effect is that of fair use. In some cases, public policy requires that certain uses of otherwise copyrighted materials be permitted regardless of what a copyright holder might claim. Classic cases include digital video recording, select permissible copying from books, etc. In the case of the John Deere software, and that of every other vehicle manufacturer that seeks to monopolize the market for repair of its vehicles through use of the DMCA's non-circumvention rules, the issue is not whether its software ought to be subject to copyright protection but rather whether they can use that protection to prevent people from conducting basic repairs on the vehicles they own. And that is a public policy question. 4. So, what is the proper public policy: should the DMCA be allowed to be used as a legal sledgehammer by which manufacturers can bludgeon owners and thereby force them to do their repairs in ways that lock them forever in to the manufacturer? It would certainly seem not. Indeed, when framed in this way, the manufacturers' position becomes extreme and even outrageous. Well, EFF, et al. are doing a good job of arguing this in the relevant places to try to shape the law fairly on this point. They are to be commended for this and, in this sense, what John Deere is arguing is pretty despicable. 5. But none of this means that they own your tractor after you buy it. Nor does it mean that copyright doesn't apply to the software they develop. It can and it does. It is just that copyright has limits and, when pushed beyond those limits, loses its salutary purpose and becomes obnoxious and damaging. 6. As a final point, nothing in John Deere's position challenges the idea of "ownership" as we know it. By framing the issue in this way, this article (in my view) tries to play on common sympathies but does so in a very misleading way. I believe this only weakens what is otherwise a sound position on preventing misuse of the DMCA. It also misstates the law pretty badly. So here are my two cents trying to correct this.
• mathattack 12y ago
  What's really wrong with this? As a provider of goods or services, I should have the right to say, "I'm only renting you this, not selling it to you. If you want to buy it, go see someone else." If I build a house, I should be able to rent it out, and not sell it if I want to keep it. If the market demands builders to sell it, some will find a way. There's no intrinsic right to forcing people to have an option to buy. If I make something that requires tedious upkeep, and will hurt my reputation if it breaks down, shouldn't it be ok for me to say, "I'm only going to rent this to you, and will take care of the upkeep myself."? (Example: A piece of machinery in a factory) Uber is selling rides. Should they be forced to sell cars too? (ok, that may be a little stretch, but it's along the same line of thought) If enough people want to fully own cars and trucks, they'll go somewhere else and drive JD and GM out of business.
  • redblacktree 12y ago
    I think the problem with this line of thinking is that most people think they're buying a car (including on board software). If it were clear to everyone that you are in fact only leasing the software, it might be better.
    • LLWM 12y ago
      How can that be made any more clear than it already is? Pretty much all software a typical consumer ever uses works this way.
      • redblacktree 12y ago
        But non-tech people think of computers and phones as running software, not their cars. In the car, it's just a "radio" or "navigation system."
  • hackuser 12y ago
    > What's really wrong with this? As a provider of goods or services, I should have the right to say, "I'm only renting you this, not selling it to you. If you want to buy it, go see someone else." ... It's a good question, but an important consideration is whether your customer has the option of saying no. For example, if you are a small farmer, you can't really negotiate with tractor manufacturers because you lack the market power; you just take what they give you. If they all deny you ownership, you're stuck. Consider someone who wants a smartphone that doesn't track them, a credit card without waiving legal rights ... I was thinking the other day of people who might have been opposed to lead in gasoline (I assume there must have been some), but they had no choice. Their fate was determined by those who had the market power to control the technology. Also, most people don't undertand the implications of what they are buying. Nobody has time to study and learn all that.
• JustSomeNobody 12y ago
  If they are allowed to tell us we don't own our vehicles, they should be forced to remove words such as "own", "sale", "sell", etc from any and all communications. Period.
• markbnj 12y ago
  The thing that strikes me, having read a couple of articles on the topic, is that the OEMs in these cases think the ownership of the code is valuable enough to jump through these legal hoops and take the hit for any negative reactions or PR that ensues. On the face of it the software would not seem to be a big component of what a farmer buys a John Deere tractor for. It has to be there, to run the thing, but does it really add that much proprietary value to the product? I don't blame the OEM for stumbling over how to deal with the ownership issues, but if I'm correct and the software is not a big part of the value prop for the equipment then just open source it and call it a day. Whats the downside of that? Someone will copy your code and start making their own tractors? Deere must feel their code is that much better than their competitors, but it's hard to believe that is really true in a practical sense.
• jpitzo 12y ago
  Bell did this with their telephones in the 60's and 70's. Customers could not own their own phone while using Bell's service. They even went so far as to stamp "BELL SYSTEM PROPERTY" into the molding. Even after they allowed 3rd party phones, they still charged a monthly fee for the privilege. It wasn't until their divestiture that they began allowing their customers to use their own phones without incurring a fee. Though it seems that was due to competitive pressure more than legal pressure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone#Ownership_and_AT.26T_divestiture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone#Ownership_a...
• JustSomeNobody 12y ago
  Why do people farm? John Deere owns your tractor. Monsanto owns your seed. The Bank owns your farms.
  • LLWM 12y ago
    Why do people develop software? Your employer, assuming WFH, owns the software you write. Microsoft owns Visual Studio. Amazon owns the AWS servers.
• MarkMc 12y ago
  Does this really have anything to do with copyright law? Imagine I offer to sell you a tractor that contains no software, but comes with the condition that you hire me to fix it if it ever breaks down. Have I just 'destroyed the very idea of ownership'?
• orbitingpluto 12y ago
  Let's go reduction ad absurdum with this: Imagine that this also applies to medical equipment and that you do not own your own mechanical heart beating in your chest. Furthermore, only franchised doctors will be allowed the encryption key to tweak your heart settings. Will the company that provided you with your heart reserve the right to terminate the software license, and consequently your life, at will? Will they be allowed to stop tweaks of the software that could save your life? Will the unfranchised paramedic be legally forced to not save your life because to do otherwise would result in a DMCA violation? Another point is that what if everything goes to hell? What if all of our tools are worthless as soon as communication infrastructure goes down? Imagine having the landscape littered with machines so productive as to easily end oncoming starvation while we pull plows with our bare hands. Short term gain for long term misery.
  • Confusion 12y ago
    Nothing absurd about it: there have already been cases of closed source pacemakers that had security vulnerabilities that won't be fixed by the seller (arguing they can't replace the firmware) and can't be fixed by the buyer.
  • koenigdavidmj 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo!_The_Genetic_Opera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo!_The_Genetic_Opera is something you might find an interesting watch.
• urza 12y ago
  Very good book on this topic: Against Intellectual Monopoly can be read online http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...
• VikingCoder 12y ago
  For anyone interested in the concept, and looking for a techno-thriller novel, I highly recommend "Daemon" and "Freedom(TM)" by Daniel Suarez.
• realrocker 12y ago
  What about the legal implications of this? If a vehicle is in a collision and there is indication that the software might be responsible, who takes the blame? This is going to get really bad.
• anigbrowl 12y ago
  The company argues that allowing people to alter the software—even for the purpose of repair—would “make it possible for pirates, third-party developers, and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software.” In fairness, this is perfectly true, and they have a legitimate economic interest in making it difficult for people to do that - although I don't agree that this should extend to being able to use the DMCA. I feel like tinkering with your own machine is an obvious case of fair use, and the DMCA should be used in cases where large chunks of one firm's software turn up in the equipment of some other firm without an appropriate license. On the other hand, If GM or John Deere were to respond with a shrug to reports of people bricking their vehicle through firmware experimentation - a risk which I think should fall firmly on the shoulders of the hacker - then there would be howls of outrage about the gear being engineered to fail, tinkerers held hostage, lives being put at risk and so on. [unsanctioned modifications could alter their vehicles in bad ways.] They’re right. That could happen. But those activities are (1) already illegal, and (2) have nothing to do with copyright. If you’re going too fast, a cop should stop you—copyright law shouldn’t. If you’re dodging emissions regulations, you should pay EPA fines—not DMCA fines. Hmm, that's true as far as the fines go, but the reality of our litigous society is that when other people become the unwilling victim of a negative externality, they'll go after whoever has the greatest ability to pay, so GM will get sued for allowing these things to happen. If they're legally protected from such suits, then every vehicle accident investigation will start with a software audit and if there's any deviation from the official firmware whatsoever the manufacturer will eschew all liability. If nobody can be sued, the the negative externality will fall upon the public. And saying that this or that branch of the government should enforce prohibitions on illegal activity is facile; this overlooks the cost of detection and enforcement, since we can't track every vehicle. Experience shows that when people know there is a high probability of getting away with some anti-social action, there are enough trolls out there that it will become a fad; for example, look up 'coal rollers' on youtube - people who modify their pickup trucks to produce as much dirty exhaust as possible, and amuse themselves by making their vehicles belch smoke at people they don't like. Offsetting this tendency at the legal level would require one of two mechanisms; either lengthy sentences designed to offset the low probability of detection (which we have now, with dire consequences), or an a priori assumption of liability where vehicular misbehavior is reported and a vehicle is found to be running non-standard firmware (which would rightly be seen as an attack on due process). Since neither of these are palatable alternatives, the likely actual response is that either prices will be raised to offset the increased tort liability claims that will be brought against the manufacturer of the original equipment, or manufacturers will invest more and more in locking down their systems by physical and digital means, which will push courts (and especially juries) closer and closer to treating modification as evidence of criminal or tortious intent. Basically the author is acknowledging the fact that there will be problems, but handwaving them into being 'someone else's problem'. Sorry to say so, but this is a common blind spot in the hacker mentality: when the marginal costs of modification fall asymptotically towards zero (because once you have knowledge and access, modifying one bit of code is as easy as any other in labor terms), the economic incentives for abuse rise, and so the probability of abuse taking place (not by you, dear reader, but by your less-scrupulous friend in the black hat over there) asymptotically approaches 1. When that abuse results in economic loss, the costs tend to land on other people as described above, and lots of hackers heap blame on the original manufacturer for not making the product sufficiently secure (the 'burglars are doing you a favor by showing you how easy it is to break into your house' argument, which is advanced with depressing regularity here). Meanwhile, outside of Bizarroland, actual technology experts—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation—have consistently labeled the DMCA an innovation killer. Indeed, but this argument depends on a hypothetical - that there would be even more innovation going on if not for the DMCA. By historical standards we already live in a period of astonishing innovation, so it's just as easy to make the argument that the DMCA has been followed by an increase in innovation. Look at the expansion of the internet, communications services, and the fact that many millions of people carry around smartphones and tablets that are far more powerful than state-of-the-art workstations were in 1998 when the DMCA was passed. One could argue that the time was right for Star Trek reboot when affordable personal technology became so good that the original TV show didn't look futuristic any more. Thankfully, we aren’t alone. There’s a backlash against the slow creep of corporate product control. Wow, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. A purely market-based response would be not to buy products that are sold this way, ie to do like those farmers who prefer older tractors, albeit somewhat less efficient ones. But realistically that's not going to happen because farmers are squeezed by debt cycles and automation pressures as much as anyone else, so if they don't use the latest technology sooner or later they end up having to sell the farm to an AgBiz conglomerate - which is, honestly, what I think this story is really about, although the writer isn't aware of that. The reality is that everyone wants the latest and greatest technology (because more often than not it's objectively awesome even when it's not perfect), but few people have access to the increasingly vast sums of capital required to develop it. Fortunately the ever-increasing R&D costs of ever-shrinking hardware are offset for the hacker by the ever-increasing quality and accessibility of the software stack, so modern tinkerers can do at their desk what their grandparents used to do in the garage, so to speak. This is a Good Thing, but whereas previous generations of tinkerers and innovators tended to get a working prototype and then offer it to the existing manufacturers, new investors, or the public in order to raise capital to go into production, software hackers are in the novel position of having near-zero marginal costs of production and distribution, and don't seem to recognize that this creates a major economic disincentive for the manufacturers who develop the underlying technology platform in the first place, since any floating liability is likely to fall upon them. There's been a fundamental economic dichotomy emerging with increasing clarity on HN over the last few years. Corporate and institutional actors that act as capital stores are regarded as oppressive when they deploy technical or legal security measures (DRM, DMCA being two obvious examples), but also blamed for security failures that result in breaches of custodial responsibility (personal data theft* or allowing their IT infrastructure to be used as an attack vector by malicious actors). I would argue that it's this increasing technological asymmetry that is driving the increasing economic asymmetry in western capitalism. To put it in a nutshell, when you are only one hack away from seeing your profit margins collapse to zero, you have every incentive to suck up as much cash as you possibly can on the front end before your incentive to produce any given product disappears. We don't have a good theory of digital economics yet, and we're not going to get one as long as stakeholders on different sides of this complex question refuse to acknowledge any other interests but their own. Producers and manufacturers must respect their customers rights to adjust and adapt the high-value capital items they've paid for to the individual problems they were purchased to solve. And hackers need to recognize that every new hackable box of tricks that appears on the market actually involved a large collective effort by other people, and stop conflating discovery of how-it-works or how-to-copy-it with authorship. * Funny how nobody has a problem with calling it personal data theft even though they strenuously object to use of the term as regards piracy. after all, when your personal data is stolen from BigCorp and resold to identity thieves, it's not like BigCorp has lost their copy of your data. I have yet to see anyone speaking up in favor of 'identity sharing' when it comes to their own data.
• oldmantone 12y ago
  Does this mean they have to insure the tractors against loss and liability? If the farmers are just operators, they shouldn't be responsible for repairs and maintenance either? Seems like they could have opened Pandora's box.
• dm2 12y ago
  They are doing it to protect the millions that they've invested into the autonomous driving software. Imagine this scenario, deep inside of a random 3rd-party firmware was an obscure piece of code that allowed complete remote control of the tractor. Several remote killdozers is what you would then have to deal with. With access to the ECU(s) the hackers could even disable John Deere and the farmers control of the tractor. Even a small bug would result in huge damage or loss-of-life. Google and Tesla will for sure not allow access to their proprietary firmware / system code. Just think about installing a custom Android ROM on a device with a very small community and then imagine that on a car or a tractor. Stick with stock John Deere firmware and purchase from a competitor if you don't agree with their policies. I remember this story from a couple of years ago. I was impressed that farmers are some of the first people to use autonomous vehicles and drones to manage and watch crops. Amazing times we live in.
• afinlayson 12y ago
  I think we just need to convince gun owners that gun companies are saying this about their guns. And then this problem goes away.
• jeena 11y ago
  I work in IT in the car industry and we are part of the GENIVI aliance, see http://genivi.org/ http://genivi.org/ > GENIVI® is a non-profit industry alliance committed to driving the broad adoption of specified, open source, In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) software. GENIVI is getting some traction and perhaps this is the an answer to problems like the OPs link explains.