DIY Tractor Repair Runs Afoul Of Copyright Law
npr.org
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Money. Sony/Ford/JohnDeere has more of it than you or I.
Copyright reform, along with corporate tax reform, both get rolled into more general economic concerns, the most prominent of which will always be unemployment. Which rarely becomes a serious issue in campaigns unless the jobless rate is particularly high.
Rand Paul and Chris Christie are both attempting to make state surveillance a "single issue voter" concern, I imagine this would be the best place to attempt to slip copyright concerns in alongside-- however, I doubt wiretapping or copyright is a big enough issue to become a real driver of campaigns the way abortion is.
With all due respect, it sounds like they guy just doesn't wanna pay a tech to come out ( whether the reason is cost in dollars or cost in time ) . I don't blame him at all, but these things have to be done in a controlled manner.
And strictly speaking, the thing shouldn't be broken in the first place. I won't go as far as to say engine monitors should never have any problems upon release, but it's close to that. This sort of thing should be close to "C.A.R. Tony Hoare complete" and very nearly provably correct.
People have been doing this for a hundred years. You could always change a machine to make it unsafe. This has only become illegal now that software is involved.
The idea that people are no longer able to fix their own equipment, or that it has to be done "in a controlled manner", is a new idea. As a society, we've been heading down this slippery slope for a long time and it's now to the point that your opinion isn't outside of the norm even on a site called Hacker News.
It's overall a lack of trust for one's fellow man. Here you are arguing about farmers breaking EPA regs or making their own equipment unsafe. When farmers are arguing to be able to make their equipment work when it needs to work using their own skills.
It is a new idea. And the irony of me saying this on Hacker News is thick as cheese.
I do have to wonder how a farmer can "fix" code for an engine status display. If it's just "broken" broken, then you'd need parts anyway.
EDIT: I've got patent dibs on the name "Hactor"
just like in software, for every one nerd that wants to fix things themselves, there are millions who do not. and those folks don't even change the oil to not lose warranty. and newer models even phone home (to the dealer!) when the engine is being abused. and it's actually sold to the buyer as a feature, because the phone home system can be used in case of theft.
do you rater sell one hactor or a million tractors?
I've worked on many farms and always spent a large chunk of my time fixing a tractor or other farm implement.
they mostly buy used. and couldn't care less about drm or dealer visits.
now if you have over a dozen they will send people in less than 4h and invite you to expensive cocktail parties every quarter
This is ridiculous when you consider we have a group of electrical and software engineers with 20 to 30 years of experience in just about all aspects of technology, including real time embedded systems and robotics. In many ways we are far more qualified to support these machines than the techs they send over. I mean, we could actually design these machines from scratch.
No, you can't get tech manuals. No, you can't have access to internals. Yes, there are a bunch of secret codes and you can't have them. And, yes, you will pay $1,000 (or whatever it was, I forget) for an additional 16 MEGA bytes of memory.
No, we are not eager to jump into a $200K machine to fiddle with it. We are busy enough with our own work. It's about simple things. When a machine goes down for some silly reason it'd be nice to be able to diagnose and get it back up and running rather than waste a bunch of time waiting for a tech who is going to enter a few secret codes to do the same. I've seen it done a bunch of times and it is infuriating.
I also do understand that the typical big iron CNC user doesn't have our profile. We are not a production shop. We have a well stocked CNC shop for prototyping product designs, just like we have pick-and-place capabilities in house. We are a product engineering firm staffed with highly experienced engineers, not a machine shop.
I can see a company like Haas deciding "no way we are giving access to internals to machinist". I get it. Yet, at the same time, they have no provisions for opening the doors to more capable users. I don't even think they have a class you can take to become qualified. Perhaps the tractor industry is similar?
I would love to see an analysis of modern machine downtime versus equivalent machines from 10 and 20 years ago.
Just imagine if the likes of JD puts all tractor operating parameters in a cloud system, and requires not just Internet access but a login to operate the machine. Not unlike a certain startup from a couple years ago that sold hardware (was it home security?) that required constant cloud access to operate.
I have friends with skid-steers who beg me to replace the keyless electronic start & monitoring console with a simple electro-mechanical key and analog gauges.
It seems like there's plenty of room for a middle ground here. Deere certainly could have opened up some kind of way for owners to get fault codes out of the system, at least for things that are user-replaceable. Hell, the UI should at least put up that message ("CHECK ENGINE OIL", "BELT BROKEN", etc). But then the owner might not buy the replacement part from Deere, right? Perhaps that's the real motivation here.
As another example, I had a check engine light on my car. It was ~$500 to check the code fault and replace a sensor. If I had my own access to those codes, I could have done the work myself for a fraction of the cost, but the car manufacturer knows that I'm limited in my options. If I want to renew my car tabs, I'll have to pay them and their service technician to do the work. It's a racket.
You can get OBD2 readers for not very much money (<$20), which would have let you read the code.
That and 2 minutes of Googling will point you in the right direction generally.
My cars haven't seen the inside of a dealer's service bay in over 10 years, other than for warranty or recall work.
If you own a BMW, for example, the detailed diagnostic information for the rest of the car is sitting on their MODBUS, which is only readable with a very expensive tool and software sold only to BMW dealers.
Whether or not you can service the rest of the car in a DIY or third-party fashion is a commercial concern, not a regulatory concern. I think BMW makes fine cars, but their anti-DIY stance is why I won't own one. (Porsche, Mercedes, and the VW group are more DIY friendly, though still not totally.)
It's this, or else it was never in the scope of work to begin with.
>Would a company like JD really keep things cryptic on purpose?
Yes. It serves their interests well.
Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens if jailbreakers get that rug pulled out from under them. It might drive a long-overdue reform of the DMCA.
make me think if the ill supported dev models were not just a way to try to corrupt that. "he can't jail break that one because it's not the Dev model. if they wanted to, they should have bought that one"
Vehicle control code is a separate deal, but liability is a nightmare. If the tractor malfunctions and kills someone, who's fault was it?
There is an excellent book called "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work" that examines this move towards things in our life that we can no longer fix on our own. You can't change the oil in fancy cars because they have no dipsticks. You can't fix the tractor because it has proprietary software. You can't jail break your phone because it's illegal (or was and could be again). Etc, etc. We are rapidly getting to the point where no one, not even the historically self-reliant, can fix the things they supposedly own. We don't actually "own" these things anymore, we are just renting them. Or best case, we have them on loan until we throw them out for something newer.
Whether all this is an improvement is a matter of discussion but there seems to be no doubt that the concept of "ownership" is rapidly changing.
This seems to be a trend across even more of society than just products with DMCA-laden micro-controllers.
Perhaps the focus of open source and hacktivism should be in an alternative ecosystem for micro-controllers?
The trick here is not the tractor itself, but the IP behind it. The tractor, or something like it, may well be produced over and over, but the IP contained within is rented out after being created once.