Do farmers have the right to repair their own equipment?
albertafarmexpress.ca
albertafarmexpress.ca
I think it's something like that. I could be wrong.
If you BUY a tractor, you should be legally allowed to repair it yourself.
He clearly didn't have the funds and was at risk of losing the car with all the added mods.
Nobody should consider they own a car if it's financed. But they are liable for the bad things that can happen.
The answer is clear. Of course they should.
I think everyone should have hte right to repair their own equipment. I think that right should be extended to rental and leased equipment too.
There are ways to have both of those things do what you want -- go and change them.
You may have the right to try and repair your equipment. No one is stopping you from doing that. Whether or not you will succeed depends on whether the manufacturer has enabled that. That last part is not a natural "right". It is a responsibility that you want the manufacturer to undertake.
That responsibility is determined by contracts and laws.
>That last part is not a natural "right"
or it may be a natural right that the manufacturer is preventing your from exercising. I agree that the opening up of the capacity to exercise that right will have to be achieved through the courts via right to repair laws and similar strategies.
Fact is the vast majority of these contested repair scenarios are not necessary. Nor is the revenue they generate.
This is not a "you" thing at all.
It is about the necessary.
And that will drive people, who despite the mess our body politic is in right now, will ultimately see law changed, and with that the scope of permissible contracts change, and with that, be better able to accomplish the necessary.
Farmers, in particular, are necessary, and what they produce is necessary.
All that makes this a "we" problem.
A problem is that this may not be feasible in practice, which is fair game in general.
Another problem, which I think is more serious and unfair, is that manufacturers might actively prevent you from repairing by, e.g, requiring software to be reset by them only when you change parts.
>But these days it’s dealerships — via sales and service agreements with manufacturers — that have legal access to these diagnostic tools. So when an error message pops up, farmers and independent mechanics are out in the cold, sometimes literally.
It's less about forcing manufacturers to do something, and more about saying to them, "if we give you permission to take away other people's rights and make it a felony for other people to build businesses around flashing firmware on your tractors without your permission, then in return you have to give people better avenues for repair."
Copyright and DRM laws create artificial monopolies that we grant companies because (for better or worse) we've decided that market intervention into creative industries and granting people limited legal monopolies over ideas is sometimes in the best interest of the market/society. But copyright is a privilege that we grant companies for pragmatic reasons, it's not a constitutional right or a natural property right. Copyright is a market intervention by the government, and it's fine for that intervention to come with caveats and conditions.
This “newsletter” is not available to readers in the EU apparently.
I’d take that as a sign it’s full of horrible trackers and malware.
Blocking it is probably for the best.
Also California.
You do not need a warning for cookies which are just used for site preferences, the IP address being stored in access.log, or any other things used for "normal site operation" and not potentially identifying the user.