Slashdot Mirror
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.
Maybe parts of it, but other parts you've only acquired a license to use. They didn't go over that at the tractor store?
That's life in the new America. You probably didn't feel the slide down the slippery slope.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Don't buy "Made in the USA". It applies to much more than tractors.
I'm sort of reminded of the early 1990s, pre-Linux, where if one wanted an OS to run on their computer, be it a UNIX flavor, DOS, or OS/2, it cost, and wasn't cheap. It makes me wonder if there would be a niche for a company that produced farm equipment to charge a tad more, as they are not using the cheapest stuff from China, but circuits would be diagrammed, parts would be available, and the equipment would be designed from the ground up for serviceability. Unlike phones and tablets where shaving off a few fractions of a millimeter is critical, a 1950s-era tractor does the job just as well as a modern one.
Of course, there is reliability. A closed source, locked-down ECU might allow something to run for a longer time between servicings, at the cost of more expensive upkeep (since parts only come from the maker.) Would customers mind dealing with a more frequent maintenance cycle, in return for the fact that parts would be cheaper and easy to get ahold of 10-20 years from now, or is the mindset of "use it until it breaks, pitch it, replace it, repeat" too firmly ingrained in the mind of consumers?
It may take some time before this happens. I'm just waiting for "consolization" of cars, where vehicles come with the same engines across the board, but you have to pay license fees to enable the turbos, unlock all horsepower, use the BlueTooth functionality on the audio head... and none of those licenses will transfer with the vehicle, which guarentees that car makers make a significant, tidy sum when a vehicle is sold. Similar with farm equipment. Want to use the PTO? That is a licensed feature and even though the transmission supports it, the TCM won't enable it unless the manufacturer gets $2000 for a license key. Want to use a combine attachment? Another $2000, and it is only good for this harvest season, but you can pay $5000 to have it enabled for five seasons.
How hot will the water get before the frog jumps out?
Posting as AC because I work for one of those 'tractor' companies.
why do people need to ask permission to fix a tractor in the first place?
1. The EPA makes us do this. We have to encrypt stuff so that you can't easily add a emissions defeat device. If we didn't encrypt it every redneck farmer would be ripping off their DPF and other emissions devices because they didn't understand it. (Just like they did with catalytic converters way back when)
2. Even if you had the 'source' in front of you it'd still require tens of thousands of dollars in tools chains. I would put money on the fact that the source isn't even in C. Building ECM flashfiles, in some work circles, is up there with voodoo. These aren't your grandpas ECMs there isn't a "Tractor_ECM.c" file that you can make some changes to and recompile with GCC. As far as I know there isn't an OSS compiler available for embedded PPC and certainly not one available for eTPU functionality.
If you want to modify your tractor or car to do your bidding you're better off making your own fully open ECM from scratch. This is what they look like under the hood and are engineered to live in places that a RaspPi or Arduino wouldn't live for more than a few days..
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).
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.
So that 'independent' repair shops can pop up across the country and remove emissions controls? They'll slap a "For off road use only" or "For demo testing only" sticker on the side while it continues to pollute at pre-2010 emissions regulations levels.
So that they can unlock power levels that took money and engineering resources to develop? What incentive does the company have to continue to develop them?
Different ratings may share a common set of hardware but 'just' have different maps and tunes. The difference between 900 HP and 950 HP is probably just a couple of bits. It doesn't mean it's "free". It's hundreds of man hours tuning both settings. It's months of test cell time burning diesel fuel to get the settings just right. It's reams of paperwork for the EPA to verify that we are within emissions and stay within emissions for so many hours.
The end result may be the difference between them may just be 0xfe to 0xff but the process it took to get there may have costed $1M+. Charging for those software changes are the way we stay in business and recoup R&D costs. Now you just want us to give it away to an independent shop for free?