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Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

My dad is a farmer and I can assure you that this is a real problem. Every piece of equipment now as its own proprietary, closed-source and, most of the time, incompatible software. Plus, many of them don't get any update after the product launch. When you are in rush to plant or harvest you just can`t afford to wait for an authorized dealer. And if they fail, good luck trying to find a replacement that is not 100x overpriced because it has been discontinued one year after you bought it. I tried repairing a GPS system once and it required a special serial cable + software which costed more than 100$ just to update the driver...

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Sounds like an opportunity...

...for famine.

.. to get sued for patent infringement. Or DMCA violation.

This is interoperability. At the very least this is a gray area.

Those are potentially why the lawsuit would fail if you're lucky. You'd still have to fight it at ruinous cost for a small business – and expect customers to disappear if there's any chance they'd be included.

This seems exactly like the type of situation for which the Librarian of Congress would carve out a DMCA exemption.

Perhaps better with the word "should" instead of "would"...

Huh, I did not know that Librarian of Congress was actually a title/position.

It is! And our current Librarian, Carla Hayden, is really incredible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librarian_of_Congress

If I may go into fanboy mode for a moment, I'd like to say that in my opinion the Library itself is one of the crown jewels of the federal government. It is also definitely worth a visit if you're ever in DC. They give free tours of the Jefferson building, and besides the beautiful architecture of the building itself, there are some very interesting exhibits on display. There's a surprising amount to see, and the staff are great- very knowledgable and friendly.

Besides its main missions of supporting congressional research and acting as the central repository library, the LoC also does a ton of great research on media preservation and archival practices... I got to tour one of their labs once- in one room I talked with an expert in the chemistry of inks used in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in the next room heard from other people who specialized in CD and audiotape manufacturing, who could talk about how specific manufacturing plants in Japan changed processes from year to year and how that affected the archival lifetime of their products. Just amazing stuff, and that wasn't even scratching the surface.

"Gray area" here means: budget an awful lot of money for lawyers.

Doesn't mean it's not a good idea, but being naive about it won't get you anywhere useful.

And to be clear, don't expect to win after that awful lot of money is spent. The law makes it really hard to succeed on these types of issues, and judges generally have very stringent/impractical interpretations (such as the interpretation that RAM copies are sufficiently fixed to infringe copyright).

I co-founded a company in this space a few years ago. We ultimately pivoted out of the space because for all of the user buy-in that we got, the legal encumbrances were way too high to be able to successfully operate without raising a lot of money just to pay lawyers. If we'd decided to go the VC route instead of bootstrapping we might have been able to make a go of it, but raising VC money for a startup in the midwest working on something as mundane as farming was looking pretty untenable.

> the legal encumbrances were way too high to be able to successfully operate without raising a lot of money just to pay lawyers.

Were these standard encumbrances that hardware and software makers put to try and lockdown their products, or was there something special about farming?

It was, for the most part, regular DRM and proprietary data/hardware format stuff that is common across industries.

The very high cost of the equipment if it were bricked for license violation, and the very narrow windows for being able to use the equipment (if you need to call John Deere and have them re-enable your tractor you've just potentially lost out on an entire seasons revenue) were also big factors. Many of the farmers that we talked to were fed up enough that they would have risked it, but between our own direct legal risks, and the risk to our reputation if our customers equipment started getting bricked, was enough to stop us from moving forward.

Thank you for the really interesting comments!

Couldn't you make a full electronics replacement kit? It's a bit more involved, but DMCA and other DRM issues just go away. All the original electronics just get removed, to be boxed up and maybe discarded.

You run your own software on your own computer with your own sensors.

It might have been with a much longer team, and a much longer time to market. We were 4 people, and as I mentioned in another comment, getting VC funding for a company in the rural midwest is essentially impossible.

The other issue is that I'm not sure we would have gotten as many buy-ins from the farmers. Many of them were very frustrated by the lack of interoperability between different pieces of equipment, their sensor data being locked behind DRM schemes, etc. They wanted to integrate the hardware and software that they owned, and wanted something that would let them do it piecemeal and with relatively little risk to their hardware. A complete overhaul wouldn't have helped with integrating their historic data, and would have definitely had a higher upfront cost and risk associated with bricking their equipment.

I expect that this software lock is stated in their terms of service. If you don't like or cannot agree with the terms you simply should not buy from them. Unfortunately companies salesman usually don't mention the less nice parts of the deal written in the terms, and that is of course on the edge of swindle.

I think in general companies go more and more aggressive and ruthless to remain profitable and fight opposition, that's our economy..

Also, the options to just "not buy from them" are rapidly decreasing.

Sythes and oxen-drawn plows don't have any terms of service but they are not competitive these days.

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