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American Farmers Are Still Fighting Tractor Software Locks (npr.org)
Manufacturers lock consumers into restrictive "user agreements," and inside "there's things like you won't open the case, you won't repair," complains a U.S. advocacy group called The Repair Association. But now the issue is getting some more attention in the American press. An anonymous reader quotes NPR:
Modern tractors, essentially, have two keys to make the engine work. One key starts the engine. But because today's tractors are high-tech machines that can steer themselves by GPS, you also need a software key -- to fix the programs that make a tractor run properly. And farmers don't get that key.
"You're paying for the metal but the electronic parts technically you don't own it. They do," says Kyle Schwarting, who plants and harvests fields in southeast Nebraska... "Maybe a gasket or something you can fix, but everything else is computer controlled and so if it breaks down I'm really in a bad spot," Schwarting says. He has to call the dealer. Only dealerships have the software to make those parts work, and it costs hundreds of dollars just to get a service call. Schwarting worries about being broken down in a field, waiting for a dealer to show up with a software key.
The article points out that equipment dealers are using those expensive repair calls to offset slumping tractor sales. But it also reports that eight U.S. states, including Nebraska, Illinois and New York, are still considering bills requiring manufacturers to sell repair software, adding that after Massachusetts passed a similar lar, "car makers started selling repair software."
"You're paying for the metal but the electronic parts technically you don't own it. They do," says Kyle Schwarting, who plants and harvests fields in southeast Nebraska... "Maybe a gasket or something you can fix, but everything else is computer controlled and so if it breaks down I'm really in a bad spot," Schwarting says. He has to call the dealer. Only dealerships have the software to make those parts work, and it costs hundreds of dollars just to get a service call. Schwarting worries about being broken down in a field, waiting for a dealer to show up with a software key.
The article points out that equipment dealers are using those expensive repair calls to offset slumping tractor sales. But it also reports that eight U.S. states, including Nebraska, Illinois and New York, are still considering bills requiring manufacturers to sell repair software, adding that after Massachusetts passed a similar lar, "car makers started selling repair software."
Until now, the whole "software lock in" thing has been something few politicians can grasp. Worse, it's something that few of their constituents give a shit about, so they don't bother to even try to understand it. Usually, everyone who would has something else they care about and few actually depend on it for a living. Outside Silicon Valley, who gave 2 shits about software?
This could definitely be a game changer. First, farmers are a VERY vocal group and the proverbial epitome of freedom of the land, founder spirit and everything that the average American feels good about. Everyone has a farmer somewhere in his ancestry and everyone can at least somehow understand how that's important. These people make the stuff you eat, after all!
And more important, people understand fixing agricultural machines. Maybe they don't do it themselves, but basically everyone who didn't exclusively grow up in a downtown area of a metropolis has at some point in time notice that these things break down and that some oil-covered mechanic is working his magic lying underneath one of those beasts to make it wroom again. People understand that this is a necessity, and more important, people expect this to be possible. They grew up with this being possible. This not being possible is something they'd consider impossible, and, worse, someone keeping you from fixing something you own, at least if it's something outside the "fixing costs more than buying a new one" throwaway-appliance garbage, is someone people consider despicable.
This could wake up our politicians. Mostly because it's no longer large corporate lobbying groups against consumers. It's large corporate lobbying groups against large farmer lobbying groups.
Grab the popcorn, folks, this is going to get interesting!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"If the consumer can not repair the purchased item, then the vendor must provide free parts and labour for the advertised lifetime of the item, provided within a reasonable response time for the industry and item in question".
In other words, a mandatory all-encompassing warranty with an SLA.
You want to lock in your customer base? How about the customer base locks in the manufacturer?
It is quite simple. If you lock your software with DRM or artificial lock, the unrestricted warranty of whole product including hw+sw fix automatically rise from 1(2) to 10 years. And the manufacturer / vendor is hereby required to be able to fix any issue on such product until the copyright to it is expired.
Disruptive business plans are a real thing. It's basically the business culture of Silicon Valley: find a traditional business, kill it and feast off its corpse. The problem is that it's a lot harder to do with something like tractors than it is with services or retail.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The real solution however is for us tech nerds to start performing outreach to the farming community and get them on board to lobby together against hardware enforced software signing. With the brunt of America's farming community behind us (as a result of their own problems caused by Tivo-ized tractors.) we should have no trouble pushing legislation through congress to end Tivoization once and for all.
Maybe a nationwide boycott by the farming and techie community. Let's see how everybody feels after a week or two of internet and agriculture blackouts.
Farmers talk amongst themselves, a lot, so a crop threatening failure to provide needed service, can quickly become a huge negative in the minds of any farmers shopping for new equipment.
Nothing like "pissing off your best customers to make more profits" as a business model, is it.
Fuck it, having worked briefly with farmers when I was younger, I'll play devil's advocate here:
1) Farmers know damned well that companies like John Deere sell their hardware at cost (or even a loss), with the intention of making their money in servicing the vehicles.
2) Farmers will howl like dogs if John Deere says "Okay, we'll sell you models that you can fix yourself. But they'll cost twice as much to buy."
And if you hadn't yet deduced it from the previous two points:
3) Farmers are a notorious bunch of whiny cheapskates who live to complain about EVERYTHING and will go to any length (legal or otherwise) to save a penny. Seriously, asking a farmer about his farm is like asking an old person about their health--expect to hear nothing but complaints, how much they're suffering, how they need this and that, woe is me, etc. And they will do ANYTHING to make even an extra dime, including hiring illegals, buying seed they know damned well is illegal, cutting corners on sanitation requirements, trying to cheat their workers and work them off the clock, lying to the government about their crop yields to get higher insurance or fallow payouts, etc., etc., etc.
In other words, farmers want their cake and to eat it too. They want all the latest developments in the technology, and they want it to be repairable by third parties--but they also want it to still be as cheap as it is now (at the price that's based on a maintenance subsidy).
And that's me playing devil's advocate for today and risking the karma hit from those of you who've never had to deal with farmers before.
John Deere should respond. "Dear farmers: We can sell it to you cheap or we can sell it to you repairable. Pick any one."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
More anti-capitalist mouth vomit. You only prove that you know nothing about capitalism or monopoly.
Nothing in regulation prevents monopolies, but through regulatory capture it sure has created a few. Regulation only leads to the very thing you are trying to prevent.
FCC: Did you want a free market? No, you get to choose from the ISP's "monopolies" we bless!
Disney: Did you want that movie in the Public domain from decades ago? You can't have it, we bought your politicians and through "regulation" we got to extend copyright effectively through your entire life!
Gas & Oil: O yea... we are really suffering by your "regulations"... they keep production down and demand high! Keep paying us you fools, we will be happy to run to the podium and cry some crocodile tears when needed to make you idiots happy that your "regulations" are hurting us. We just do what we want and pay a fine or two... you don't even get the money the government does so you get fucked twice... we love it! Enjoy your oil bath... brought to you by BP!
Government: You want regulation? Why of course, we are happy to help! Please ignore the loop holes and monopolies we create with these new regulatory laws... you asked us to do this remember? You need to step away from the table now and don't forget to leave a donation on your way out... don't forget the lube either... we like to get rough on that ass! In fact we are beginning to thing you love this shit... the more we politicians treat you people like chattel & serfs the more you come running to us! It's a real win-win for us!
You need to stop blaming capitalism for something regulation does not prevent either! You only succeed in revealing that you are an ignorance mouth piece.
PEOPLE, not corporations. Regulate Corporate behavior, not sovereign citizens.
But remember Mitt Romney said, "corporations are people" and the Citizens United ruling basically asserts the same thing. I don't agree with either of those, but that's the way it is.
On the other hand, if corporations *are* people then they should have the same responsibilities as people and I should have the same opportunities as corporations -- for example, I'd like to register myself in Delaware, while, living elsewhere, to take advantage of that state's favorable banking and corporate litigation regulations, and/or when a corporation does something illegal, someone should definitely go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, instead of being able to pay a fine, etc...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
People who lived paycheck to paycheck had NO health insurance. This was the problem obamacare was trying to fix. Something like 20% of the population of the United States has no insurance or terrible insurance. You can try to pretend that this isn't true, you can assert loudly that it is "their choice" not to buy insurance, but -- remember, they are living PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK or on NO PAYCHECK AT ALL. If they chop out $200 to $300 each month (or far, far more) for insurance, you're just saying that they have a choice between eating, or wearing shoes, or living somewhere other than under a highway overpass, and health insurance.
My wife is a physician and has been taking care of these patients for her whole career. Your "free market" solution for most of her career was this: If an indigent patient (or one who lived paycheck to paycheck, or one who just couldn't/wouldn't afford to pay) walked in to see her, she could see the patient, accept whatever medicare (elderly) or medicaid) (poor) payments they might qualify for -- well under the market value of her billable time -- or just see them pro bono, which she might well do for a patient she'd been seeing who lost their job. Hospitals were in an even worse state. If somebody walked in off the street into a hospital ER, they were LEGALLY OBLIGATED to take care of them, whether or not they could pay. Even a very small hospital/ER visit costs a lot of money, and medicare/medicaid (if it pays or paid anything at all) payed only a small fraction of the actual cost of the visit.
Your "free market" pre-obamacare solution was thus to screw the physicians and hospitals and nurses by simultaneously requiring them to provide medical treatment to people who couldn't afford it and exploiting their good nature on top of that for people living on the edge of the poverty who -- at best -- could only afford to pay something much less than the cost of the service and cannot possibly afford even the cheapest health insurance. And before you even start, let me assure you that for a physician in pretty much any practice, overhead is AT LEAST 2/3 of their billing, maybe a little bit more, so a free patient isn't just a matter of a physician contributing a bit of time, it is contributing their own time and PAYING their nurses, receptionists, PAs, for the lab (and any labs they order) and of course there is the building itself and all utilities all paid OUT OF POCKET -- directly eating into their income. This isn't a zero sum break even games, they lose money for underbilling and collectable accounts, and medicare/medicaid doesn't even pay for the overhead on the visits they supposedly pay for. So yeah, in order not to go broke WHILE working 60-65 hour weeks for half of what they would be making in a "free" market, they charge 30% more to everybody else (more like 100% in hospitals, where hospital ERs are the most expensive possible way to deliver routine health care). Guess what! You've socialized medicine, but in the worst possible way, the least fair way. And the saddest thing of all is that people don't even realize that this has happened, and yammer on about free markets and how having competitive insurance plans is somehow optimal and can take care of everybody that needs -- is mandated in law -- to be taken care of.
Obamacare didn't fix this problem, of course. It did, however, make it a lot better, and more fair, in that by increasing the number of the insured and directly subsidizing insurance for the working poor who previously had to rely on the charity of doctors or hospitals to get medical treatment or routine well-patient care, they passed the costs on to the people of the US collectively instead of forcing the physicians and hospitals individually to do what they insisted that they do, at a loss. And I'm not just talking the unemployed, I'm largely talking about precisely those living paycheck to paycheck, often working several jobs because employers don't want to have to provide benefits and only let them work 30 hours a week (each). I have
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.