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Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have To Fix Copyright Law (slate.com)
Gr8Apes writes: How many people does it take to fix a tractor? When the repair involves a tractor's computer, it actually takes an army of copyright lawyers, dozens of representatives from U.S. government agencies, an official hearing, hundreds of pages of legal briefs, and nearly a year of waiting. Waiting for the Copyright Office to make a decision about whether people like me can repair, modify, or hack their own stuff. why do people need to ask permission to fix a tractor in the first place? It's required under the anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even unlocking your cellphone required an act of Congress to make it legal.
This basically sums up the problem with the economy - it is gummed up with jobs that do not produce real wealth. Sure, lawyers will say that copyright laws are important because they give an incentive for real wealth creators to do stuff, but there is no natural law that ensures that the amount of human energy that goes into protecting existing wealth would not have produced a net greater benefit for society if it had been directed at creating new real wealth instead.
We've been here before many times. War, essentially, is a massive mobilisation of human effort in a completely pointless (in terms of net prosperity) way. After WW2 we finally started to learn to put our efforts towards building more stuff for everyone, instead of trying to find better ways to steal some other country's stuff, and for many years this was incredibly successful for humanity.
The more I've learnt about how the current financial and legal system works, the more I realise how naive us tech people are, busy working on making stuff. Most engineers I know are smart enough to clean up against the sorts of people who get a law or business degree, but we tend to be too idealistic about how the world works. In the end it's just sad that we live in an economic system where you are better off financially trading the same houses between each other, rather than going out and building new houses (or transport systems to open up areas for new housing).
I've commented on this before. IBM, I believe, called this 'functional pricing' in the 1970s. When I started in computing in the mid 1970s, ICL (UK mainframe manufacturer) had two printers, a 300 lines per minute and a 600 lines per minute, no difference except a couple of resistors (this was pre 'unlock') and, of course, the price.
Of course, theoretically, 'competition' in 'markets' should stamp this out. However, a great deal of competition now seems to be for the best cheating (VW et al.) and best regulatory capture (DMCA etc.). Bless 'shareholder value' and screw the consumer.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
New auto drive car = no more updates after 1 year so you need to buy a new car to get that update.
There should be a law say that they must get free updates for at least 5-7 years even if there needs to be a computer replacement to fix an safety issue that must be done at there cost.
Make a law saying that independent repair shops must get the same software and codes that the dealers get and the software can't be locked down to only on dealer systems or be rent only.
You reverse engineer it, publish all the information anonymously and tell these companies to FUCK THEMSELVES.
It's starting in the Car world, The reverse engineering of the Honda ECU's you can get the details and source code out there if you look hard enough. some GM ECM's have been completely hacked, and the BMW dealership coding software has been released and you can get it.
Tractors in the article are incredibly niche devices so it's going to take longer, but full details needs to be published publically and everyone needs to spread it far and wide.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Simple law: If you sell something, the customer must have the right to repair it or you must offer full zero-deductible warranty for the (clearly) advertised lifetime of the device or software.
Dodge/Chrysler and the "60,000 mile change interval" fluid in their CVTs - originally single sourced from them at $80/qt, with 6 qts required for a change.
By the time those POS cars are at 120Kmi, they're barely worth $1500 on the open market, and they've got a planned maintenance that required $500 "worth" of fluid?!? - luckily, some 3rd party sources are showing up (and "only" charging $73 for a case of fluid) and in response the dealers have come down from $80 to anywhere from $28 to $18 per qt, depending... , but, seriously, at what point do we have to ask our legislators to step in and call BS on this kind of stuff? Fluids are one thing, it's pretty easy to call monopoly on that, but DMCA is a kind of monopoly protection that apparently has escaped the notice of anyone in power who might care.
And this, IMHO, is complete bullshit. You have a right to know exactly what code is running in a machine you own, and how it works, down to every last freakin' instruction. You have the right to inspect the design of the property you own, and figure out how it works, and modify it if you choose, even if existing law doesn't respect that right.
The actual manufacturer of the CVT doesn't recommend fluid changes, except "as needed", which may be never. It's just the Chrysler factory service manual that says "60,000 miles" which I think is borderline criminal - putting something like that in writing when the actual designer and maker of the component clearly states otherwise.