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Farmer Lobbying Group Sells Out Farmers, Helps Enshrine John Deere's Tractor Repair Monopoly (vice.com)
Jason Koebler writes: The California Farm Bureau, a group that lobbies on behalf of farmers, reached a "right to repair" agreement with the Equipment Dealers Association (which represents John Deere and other manufacturers) last week. But the specifics of the agreement were written by the manufacturers, and falls far short of providing the types of change that would be needed to make repairing tractors easier. In fact, the agreement makes the same concessions that the Equipment Dealers Association announced in February it would voluntarily give to all farmers. The agreement will not allow farmers to buy repair parts, break firmware DRM, or otherwise alter software for the purposes of repair.
If farmers do not actually own the vehicle they pay for, but instead only receive a âoelicense to operate the vehicleâ as John Deere claims, shouldn't repairs all be at the cost of John Deer, and any losses due to mechanical or software failure mean John Deere is liable for damages...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Any group that "lobbies on behalf of $group" will whore their services to the highest bidder.
It just happens that the Equipment Dealers Association offered them a sweeter deal than the farmers that they ostensibly represent.
Not that they will return the farmers' money or anything like that.
If they wanted to be left alone, maybe they should tone down the criticism of how everyone else are living their lives...
Er, wut!?
Seriously.
If someone is trying to control how you live your life, then they are the nearly polar-opposite of a small-'L' libertarian. Believing that everybody should stay out of other people's business and leave everyone else the hell alone to think, believe, marry, smoke this or that, or say stupid and hateful shit or sing beautiful music, etc etc is the short version of being libertarian. Not some stupid shit about lawlessness/Somalia and no government.
Just a government that isn't in your grill all the time micro-managing, regulating, invading your privacy and violating civil rights, and taxing the shit out of everything and everyone, all resulting in the US having the world's largest percentage of a nation's citizens incarcerated in prisons.
Yeah, libertarians are a real scary bunch, alright.
Watch out, some sneaky libertarian could be covertly leaving you the hell alone right NOW!!!1!!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
It's against the hacker ethos. Period. RMS started his software crusade because he couldn't change a printer's software driver. I'm pretty sure the gun nut ESR would be against this as well. Lessig was also against this kind of legislation and he was working for a Supreme Court judge appoint by Reagan. I think our opinion is quite broad across the political spectrum. Unfortunately there is a Cult of the Mac in the house which seems to think it's better to discard our values in the name of... what?
How well did the lawsuit of Apple vs the repair guys go exactly? Yeah right.
If this went to court I can expect what would happen to John Deere.
What free market? It is a special, weird law (DMCA) that is preventing them from repairing the tractors. A free market wouldn't ever have anything like DMCA.
It is also the Libertarian point of view that John Deere is free to consume as much of the market as they can, through any means deemed legally acceptable no matter how morally reprehensible. Power should be concatenated as densely into as few hands as possible, to maximize freedom in the "volunteer" camps where the workers voluntarily work for company scrip to purchase goods from the company store and their children can only be born in the company hospital if they "volunteer" to pay off the hundreds of billions of debt they incur simply by being born by working in the "volunteer" camp their entire life. Mmmm Libertarianism!
Ummm.... No. Not even close. John Deere has the right to make whatever products they like and market them however they want. As does Husqvarna and Kubotai and every other manufacturer. But they are ALL required to deal honestly with the customers, and restrictive "terms of use" must be FULLY DISCLOSED at the time of sale.
And once the product is sold, it BELONGS TO the purchaser. They can break it, modify it, fix it, whatever they want. "Right to Repair" laws ought to be unneeded because they should be flipping obvious. If Deere wants to sell tractors that cannot be repaired, then the dealer needs to have big signs up in the showrooms. And they'd better make sure sure that you can't take them apart with ordinary tools.
I take it you haven't been inside a modern tractor?
Most attachments are electronically controlled from the drivers cab, it all has sensors, it all needs to communicate, it all refuses to do a damn thing until you hook it up to an approved tractor.
Printer cartridge protection is nothing by comparison.
No sig today...