Farming Co. Says John Deere Is Monopolizing Repair Market
law360.com
law360.com
What that may mean is that legislation would require, e.g., that anyone doing any business with the government or using any government/public services (e.g., GPS) must utilize technologies that are common and compatible with each other both physically (parts) and data (communications, controls, etc.).
We are facing a situation that was last encountered or at least recognized in the late 80s and 90s, where silos and cartels were starting to emerge that led to massive waste and pillage of at least the public coffers. That led to a wave of standardization efforts in the late 90s and early 00s. That wave seems to have started dying out and really needs to be revitalized.
For example, California wants to electrify lawn equipment: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/zero-emission-lands...
There are a number of competing ecosystems of batteries. They each have a leaf blower that takes a different form factor battery:
https://www.ryobitools.com/products/details/46396029911
https://www.dewalt.com/products/outdoor/blowers/20v-max-lith...
https://www.milwaukeetool.com/Products/Safety-Solutions/Emis...
Batteries are expensive and use a lot of carbon to produce, so the world would be better off if these batteries were fully interchangeable.
To my knowledge none of these companies are manufacturing cells directly, and the only thing that is different between them is the shape of the connector, and the design/firmware of the battery management system. And the connectors are mostly not all that different, just variations on a theme designed to explicitly prevent cross compatibility.
I don't see a compelling reason these couldn't be standardized, nor why this wouldn't lead to more innovation as manufacturers will have to compete on merit, rather than vendor lock in.
Batteries are getting so good nowadays. Imagine if instead of everything needing its own special battery you just had a few quality packs that were interoperable with all your tools/devices/ebike/etc.
*Edit: grammar
I believe that simply requiring certain standards to have a freely available specification + right to repair will get us in a good place.
I was talking about the labels on fruits (you know, those labels you just peel off so you don't eat them) with someone who knew about this sort of thing . I ignorantly said "that's gotta be a low-margin business."
He said, "Actually, it's a high-margin business."
If you get a monopoly in some market that's very difficult to enter, you've got yourself a steady cash flow. I don't think "repairing tractors out in the middle of nowhere" is a very easy one to get into.
But how is the market for fruit labels difficult to enter?
It could be that the farmers & handlers already know the main suppliers and they're satisfied with them: low prices, good service, acceptable quality. And they're not looking for even lower prices.
If you have a monopoly and you've ridden the learning curve far enough that you're making a good profit while not pissing off your customers, and the market is pretty static, you're in.
But I could be wrong.
E.g. you can double your margins on fruit labels, and still be a rounding error for fruit producers
Consequently, being invisible and fanatically attentive to what your customers want (e.g. ease of use) means the hassle of switching suppliers outweighs the cost savings.
In some businesses, having been around for a long time, being part of the community, and knowing your customers is worth WAY more than a few points of profit. In fact, those businesses are everywhere. Look and see who buys the ads for the high school sports teams.
Tractor repair ought to be like that. Not the monopoly of John Deere.
(I don't know anything about who owns fruit-labelling, and it might even be some giant conglomerate.)
But let's say someone owns such a loyalty business, everything is great, and then they die or retire. Then what?
It's the source of a million dramas, like Yellowstone or King Lear. Maybe a son or daughter takes over. Then they're incompetent. Or not. Maybe the kids fight over it. The possibilities are endless.
Or maybe the giant conglomerate DOES buy it. Promising "nothing will change" of course.
E.g. What happens when the local diner goes out of business? There's no Law of Diners that mandates someone else step up. Sure, a McDonald's or Wendy's might drop in. But that's not really the same thing. (Restaurants are the obvious example, but it could just as easily be a machinist or florist. Flavor analogy to desired niche industry)
As an example: Royall Machine, Lottsburg, VA https://www.google.com/maps/place/2461+Northumberland+Hwy,+L...
Was there for 30+ years. Could make about anything you needed out of metal. Now, just isn't.
And moreover, the customers, having become cultured to dealing with the existing business, now have to radically alter their expectations when interacting with a more corporate entity. McMaster-Carr is great, but it's a darn sight different than bringing in a broken part, and having a duplicate made in about a week.
I think restaurants tend to have a certain layout that's especially good for another restaurant.
But then: near me, there was a Rite Aid that closed shop 3 or so years ago, and a brand new Grand Dynasty dim sum restaurant just opened up. God only knows how much they spent renovating that place, It must have been at least 2 years worth of work.
Typically, quite the opposite happens and investors and entrepreneurs see the opportunity to compete, but quickly discount it because the risk to compete is too high relative to barriers to entry. As long as your barriers to entry are high enough, a bonus if on of the barriers is capital intensive (time is something many can sacrifice but capital can be conjured out of thin air), you're going to be nearly impossible to dethrone by a competitor coming in.
You can usually spot competitors a mile away approaching the outermost mote your castle has and head them off early, perhaps establish an early friendship, or acquire them at a low cost before they get anywhere near the crown jewels. The trick is to get the foothold and momentum in a market. After that it's difficult for competitors to actually compete unless you're asleep at the wheel.
Not as hard as you think (I've worked on cars, vans and even semi trucks). By the local Autozone (a chain of automotive parts store) there is a man who repairs cars on the street out of a an old, short school bus. He also does house calls. He has a generator, air compressor, welder, jacks, engine hoist, all the tools needed, and even some parts. Same setup would enable tractor repair with the addition of some heavier tools to handle the larger bolts and so on.
John Deere is electronically locking their equipment so no one but them can figure out whats wrong or reset/clear error codes to restore normal operation. It's just shenanigans.
The only thing you cannot do without a dealer is replace a ECU. This is part anti-theft, and part to ensure you don't mess with the emissions.
If you want a simple and cheap tractor, you can find a Farmall from like 40 years ago and restore it easily for like a grand or two (at least my friends dad was still doing this in 2008).
Typically whenever a once competitive firm becomes a lazy monopolist, at some point others want to break in and get a piece of the profit pie. It could happen someday.
Another aspect of what we are experiencing here I think is essentially a multi-level/nested con job that uses that artificial and perception of complexity to extract ever higher and compounding levels of what what are essentially rents.
The established industry players are banking on the high barrier to entry (heavy machinery production) and brand recognition (Runs like a Deere) to con the whole sector, and therefore extract wealth from the whole of society trying to feed itself.
Please feel free to challenge my perspective.
I suspect that it will take some other innovation to make this worthwhile to fund. Right to repair is not innovation, its just a single feature change, so nobody cares to solve it. It generates complaints, but probably doesn't hurt sales.
At some point, maybe electrification will be that innovation. Or maybe form factor? but, JD is not ignoring product development, they just have expensive spare parts.
A data point I never see is what JD reliability is like. Toyota has expensive spare parts compared to several of their competitors, but they are also very reliable. If JD's DRMs and expensive parts are concomitant with reliable tractors, then maybe this issue is really just interesting to techno libertarians and not actual farmers? I don't have any sense for the size of the JD repair market.
I've come across the term "confusopoly":
From a high level, this doesn't seem a whole lot different than the scan tools needed to diagnose new cars. Some of which are vendor-locked on cars, but at minimum, there are OBDII codes and scanners available to consumers. It's the more marque-specific scan tools that aren't as readily available (but even then, I believe indy service shops can buy/license them, but it's very expensive).
He has to call out someone to show him how to drive it and has no idea how to get it hitched. All coming from a man who has driven more cars of different types than probably anyone on the planet. Granted, it is a comedy, buy I think if you watch the first episode, you'll get the idea as I did.
The problem is, as in many other domains, a combination of opportunity cost and network effect.
Getting in the commercial farming game is going to be expensive as hell and gruelling as you try to get a foothold, and unlike, say, a car, your average farmer has a ton of equipment from the same brand which works together, and the more time passes the harder it becomes to interop (though I guess at least in farming you don't have too many patented hitches or PTOs these days?)
Not to mention in farming you really need to have a network on the ball for parts and repairs, if you fuck up a farmer's season by leaving them stranded for a week they're not going to be happy campers.
Both of these would be serious issues for operating a modern, large scale farming operation.
Oh, and most GPS steering systems don't come with the tractor, and some types of systems are retrofitted onto any tractor with a steering wheel.
However for large-scale agriculture where your tractor is pulling high-end machinery you need something very powerful and sophisticated. JD leads this market, and is a significant player in the mid-range also.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see the brand loyalty to Deere lasting too much longer, especially if some of the Asian competitors can make offerings without all the shackling.
So why would you want to do something as risky and foolish as that when you got a good thing going?
We assume it's silent but we probably shouldn't. It could be a boring old cartel. Someone should check.
Do you know that this is the case or are you speculating? It seems like there's an intense amount of competition, especially with imported farming equipment. (I have no idea if John Deere sells overseas or if it's mostly a domestic brand.)
Some other manufacturers that seem to have big branding in the U.S. are New Holland (just found out they're owned by Fiat.. small world), Mahindra, and Kubota. Are those all part of this cartel that you're alleging exists?
I don't work in farming but I worked for an European HW manufacturer that's top in Europe in that niche and the CEO back then told us we're not aggressively pursuing expansion outside of Europe since US, China, Japan, Korea have their own local champions in this market and it's not profitable to go to war with them on their own turf, so he told us about this silent gentlemen's agreement where everyone keeps to his own market so we can all profit as "the pie is big enough for everyone, if we start fighting over it then we'd all lose". I assume the same business concept applies here.
Case, and Deere go head to head in almost every market. New Holland and a couple others also play in the same markets depending on what KIND of machine you're looking to run. Tillage tractors are pretty much fendt/challenger, NH, deere, case. When you get into combines/coppers other brands also play. For the consumer and/or smaller tractor market there's all sorts of options.
Why people go deere or case is simple. It's the supply chains. You have N days to get your crop in the ground, and Y days to get your crop harvested. Deere and case have the best(and most expensive) field techs and dealer support. "A machine is only as good as your dealer support" is the phase almost everyone uses when shopping for equipment. Anyone with a significant investment of tractors(non-hobby farmers) can have a case or deere tech replace or fix damn near anything in hours or days, on site.
Versatile is making inroads again. Starting to see quite a few of them around.
So if there is competition and Deere is really the best, I don't see the issue. The right incentives are there to make farming better.
The big operators running new couldn't care less. They keep stuff for a year, two at the most, and off it goes to the next farm. New equipment is least likely to break and when it does it is the manufacturer's problem to fix it. Also, the first generation operators are quite likely to lease the equipment, so it is not even theirs to worry about.
The slightly smaller second generation owners are still likely under warrantee and the machines are new enough that they shouldn't be breaking down in any meaningful capacity. Especially when it comes to the electronics. While they might have a mechanic on staff, it's just as easy to contract that out to the dealer.
It's the third, fourth, fifth generation owners that are more concerned. They start to buy the equipment when it has some age on it, starting to wear out, is more likely to break and isn't under warrantee. They also are more likely to want to fix it themselves.
It's easy to say don't buy Deere, but if that's all the bigger operators bought when they were new, there won't be anything else on the used market. The other manufacturers haven't been able to carve out a market of machines that can serve those smaller farmers with new equipment.
It is all very theoretical at the moment, though. This is not a problem today. There are plenty of options on the used market, with no signs of that changing, and even if you do end up with a Deere fixing it yourself hasn't been a problem to this point. But there is worry from some that things will change in the future.
And when you're out of business, they'll go back to their old ways.
They do make really really good machines, and their top-end gear is very highly regarded. All the above has allowed them to get away with some dubious practices. However farmers are also very cost conscious and there is growing dissatisfaction at the blatant lock-in.
> I can't see the brand loyalty to Deere lasting too much longer
Here's an anecdote: if I go into Fleet Farm or Tractor Supply (farm supply stores), I see John Deere toy tractors, in fact my son has one: they're very well built. I don't think I've ever seen any other brand of toy tractor. That alone says a lot.
JD walked so that Apple could run
White fabrics, usually of cotton or linen.Household merchandise, as bed sheets and curtains, formerly made from white fabrics, but now often colored.Large household appliances, as ovens and refrigerators, formerly finished with white enamel, but now often colored.
- American Heritage DictionaryTwo reasons we passed on JD FEL is 1) financing isn't as good 2) you have to pay JD a yearly maintenance package AND take it in once a year otherwise your warranty is shit. That could be incorrect and just one dealer we spoke to, but it didn't add up with the better stuff we're hearing from the Kubota side.
May be a case of Deere getting aggressive. Another friend bought a new Steiger series tractor a few years ago and before it even showed up in his yard, Deere rolled in to make him an offer he couldn't refuse to trade it in.
is the bucket really just not the use case for a FEL anymore?
edit: Sorry I see you were specifically discussing the FEL that can handle 4k vs 1k. Mostly Gravel is my largest use-case. I won't be able to pallet lift a ton of bricks, that is correct. But for the rest of the tool it's like a swiss army knife in that it has different attachments both on the front, the back (and the bottom).
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/nordictrack-ifit-treadmill-privi...
I just googled to find the reference[0], but apparantly he had a problem with his clutch, went to ferrari and suggested some easy ways that ferrari could make their clutches last longer. Ferrari responds with:
> “Let me make cars. You stick to making tractors.” - Enzo Ferrari
Which obviously didn't go down too well. Then Lamborghini started making cars.
[0] https://www.granturismoevents.com/story-the-epic-story-behin...
Sort of yes and no.
No one has done anything to stop them just like no one has done anything to stop Apple or the other tech companies.
Farmers have done a lot of lobbying and other work around right to repair just to work on their equipment. This includes being apart of efforts with the Library of Congress for the exemption that comes up every so often. They've been there alongside people in tech circles.
I think it’s hard to keep a consistent world view where right to repair is a thing, and at the same time anything but open source is outright illegal.
It seems that I could have a highly proprietary device and still be able to repair it. It would just require availability of 1) documentation 2) diagnostics, 3) parts at market prices, 4) parts not locked by DRM code.
E.g., the iPhone could still have all their proprietary code, as long as I can read about the components and their relationships, diagnose a problem, replace a component and/or flash new data/code onto the device.
Same for a car or tractor. Meaningful repair doesn't require that we be able to dismantle and re-solder sub-board-level components, only identify the particular component, obtain it at a reasonable availability and cost, and replace it, or be able to substitute an upgraded part.
Am I missing something here?
As a group heavily populated by programmers and coders, I think it’s fairly hypocritical to say that everyone should make their IP like schematics freely available while we keep software under copyright.
> Am I missing something here?
- How is a defect like an aged battery different than a non-updated software?
- Why is it inmoral for a company to limit your ability to swap a battery but totally okay to not give you the code so that you can patch their software to work on your machine?
At least in the case of the battery they can argue that inappropriate handling of faulty batteries is dangerous.
> Meaningful repair doesn't require that we be able to dismantle and re-solder sub-board-level components, only identify the particular component, obtain it at a reasonable availability and cost, and replace it, or be able to substitute an upgraded part.
That “only” is doing a lot of work there. That “only” is the work of a lot of people who deserve to get good salaries too. Why should their work become a commodity while programmers keep their “machines” protected with the laws for art?
>>- Why is it inmoral for a company to limit your ability to swap a battery but totally okay to not give you the code so that you can patch their software to work on your machine?
I agree it is NOT okay to prevent access to the code, although that does NOT mean that I'd require release of source code.
So, while I don't have your source code secrets, I should not be prevented by crypto or law from analyzing, editing, or replacing the object code. I should be prevented from selling at scale trivially modified copies.
This is not unlike trade secret protection of parts. I have a carbon fiber composites shop, and I make some rather uniquely interesting high-performance parts with interesting chemistries and nanotechnology. If you want to take one and examine it with an electron microscope and try to figure out what I did, fine, but good luck to ya; hope you're having fun. There's also nothing preventing someone from selling a competing part of the same shape.
The problem with no RTR is that the companies become extractive without adding commensurate value - it allows them to charge on both ends.
If a company wants to maintain complete control over the equipment, then fine, lease it only. GM actually did this with their first electric cars in the 90s. But these companies want to sell it full price up front and then also extract a guaranteed high-cost lease-like ongoing revenue stream for the life of the machine. Many software companies have switched from a sell-the-package model to SAAS subscriptions, but this is like you have to buy the package AND the subscription.
>>That “only” is doing a lot of work there. That “only” is the work of a lot of people who deserve to get good salaries too. Why should their work become a commodity while programmers keep their “machines” protected with the laws for art?
I've got no problem with good salaries, I do have a problem with monopolistic extraction because you have the customer tied over a barrel and a gun to their head.
When there is a legitimate market of repairs, it at least provides options for the customer, and is likely to keep the Factory Authorized channel somewhat reasonable. Just doing all warranty repairs through the factory channel and voiding the warranty for independent repairs can keep all those factory channel people in fine salaries. Meanwhile everything from high-end tuners to el-cheapo-fix-it shops can thrive and customers can have options, all without threatening the core business, and even enhancing it.
What you are making me think about is that there should be MORE of this capability in software also. Allowing trivial copying and reselling is obviously obscene and unsustainable (see open-source developers getting shat-upon by the $$multimillion companies they support for free). However, perhaps requiring rights to an API and plug-in capability or the ability to create derivative works should be available. Certainly we should have rights to reuse and modify abandoned software, especially if it requires a server to run.
There is no 'copyright' on mechanical parts, anyone is free to make a copy, and you are free to buy them from anyone.
Even if a part is patented (which is a small percentage), the patent law spesifically allows anyone to build anything for personal use.
If I have to repair my toaster, and it contains a microcontroller, then I can buy that microcontroller but not the firmware. The firmware belongs to the manufacturer, even if all it does is have a time to eject bread. So my toaster is unrepairable if that chip dies. That toaster could never be patented, beucase there is nothing innovative.
There was no such right in the 80s, any more than there is now.
In both times you could repair what you or repair people obtained the skill to do. There was no inherent, moral right, and no legal right, then or now.
Also in the 80's plenty of domestic appliances, cars, and tractors contained computers.
https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/when-did-cars-get-comput...
https://www.haytalk.com/threads/what-year-did-the-computers-...
Ah, well if we can divorce ourselves from facts, then yes, we can believe anything.
What legal way am I locked out? There are exemptions in US (and other law) for copyright, patents have not changed, trademarks don't stop me.
There are zero items in my house (and I have all sorts of tech) that I cannot take apart (and routinely do) and fiddle with and hack on and change and repair if I feel so inclined.
Sure, the average person with low tech skills and low tech tools has a harder time, but the things being worked on are simply much more specialized and complex. I bet the average person has been unable to repair a fine watch for a century - that's needed a specialist, since it was high tech a century ago.
Or do you mean repair has gotten more complex as technology has gotten more complex? That has been and always will be the case. Repairing an axe is always going to be easier than repairing an iPhone.
Please point out to me which copyright exemption will enable me to get hold of firmware for a microcontroller in my washing machine if the current one gives up the ghost. I can buy an identical microcontroller, and solder it in place of the current one, but without firmware the device is dead. The same applies to all appliances, from toasters to cars, it has nothing to do with skill. This was not the case a few decades ago.
Additionally, you clearly haven't been paying attention to recent events. John Deer literally shuts down your tractor, and even if you repair it, it won't start untill you pay their mechanic to come over and reset it. It is not a matter of skill - the machine is locked and only their mechanics have authorisation to rest it. The same is happening with phones, computers and domestic apliances.
https://repair.eu/news/part-pairing-a-major-threat-to-indepe...
Getting around some of these restrictions can land you in jail
https://hackaday.com/2015/05/12/ask-hackaday-fixing-your-tra...
Oh, now you're confusing right to repair with ease of repair. No country has ever forced manufacturers to give you every single item to suit your heart's desire.
Rip the firmware out of the MCU. Decap it and read the bits out, literally with a microscope, as some have done. "Oh, but that's too hard!" Exactly - and there is no legal thing stopping you. You simply don't want to develop the expertise and tools to repair. You want it handed to you in a simple manner, which has never been the case.
As I said above, as things become more complex, so does repair.
>This was not the case a few decades ago.
Yes, a few decades ago people complained about different parts they could not simply buy, since at no point in US history could you simply get any part you ever desired from a manufacturer. There has always been a few things you could buy, a repair man market for some things, and the effort to repair other things difficult enough that almost nobody tried to do it.
Because again, we have more complex items now.
>Additionally, you clearly haven't been paying attention to recent events
Yes, I've read all that stuff. Both sides in many of these cases, including the JD, have decently valid points. If someone causes a large machine to hurt others, you bet JD will get dragged into courts. For that balance, it is reasonable for courts to decide how to balance.
Should individual commercial pilots be allowed to flash the software on their flights because they're interested in hacking their planes?
>Getting around some of these restrictions can land you in jail|
No one, zero, count them, have gone to jail for that. Zero. Why do you spout this type of nonsense? "Think of the children!" right?
>John Deer literally shuts down your tractor
No, they don't. "As things stand, Deere has the technical ability to remotely shut down a farmer’s machine anytime—if, say, the farmer missed a lease payment or tuned a tractor’s software to goose its horsepower, a common hack widely available through gray-market providers. A Deere spokesman says many manufacturers can remotely control vehicles they sell, but Deere has never activated this capability, except in construction equipment in China, where financing terms require it to." [1]
Also, there is literally zero they did that someone could not reverse engineer and fix.
All of this is you want things to be as easy to fix as a kid can do. That will never happen as devices become more complex.
But all of this, even John Deere tractors, can be fixed.
Based on your resorting to making claims that are simply lies, I'm done. Feel free to continue.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-f...
"Based on your resorting to making claims that are simply lies, I'm done."
You are the one presenting a total lie!
If I read firmware out of my BOSH washing machine and sell it to repair stores so that they can fix more washing machines, I will get shut down withing days. If start making and selling motors identical to the one in this machine, no-one can stop me.
Failing to recognise this distinction indicates you are not interested in an real coversation, but just want to push your ideology.
Tell me what law protected your right against copyright before the DMCA?
Good luck.
You mean against DRM? The subject has no relation to copyright, except on how those companies keep abusing copyright laws. Anyway, you don't need protection against DRM if you don't criminalize breaking DRM.
And yeah, it carves out an exception for repair. It's funny how a narrow exception in an overbroad law ends up having no effect on practice.
What do you think the C in DMCA stands for?
>It's funny how a narrow exception in an overbroad law ends up having no effect on practice.
Simply untrue. There are massive collections of things gathered under and repaired under this "no effect" exemption.
Sometime take a look at the dozens of exemptions allowing all sorts of repair, reverse engineering for interoperability, removing of copy protection where needed to continue to use items, etc. [1] Or just Google DMCA 1201 exemptions and read blog posts. You'll be surprised.
No we didn’t. In the 80s a lot of stuff was simply easier to repair, in part because you had less stuff to begin with.
You’re still free to repair whatever you want, but of course nowadays things are so complex that I’d require you an insurmountable amount of work. There hasn’t been any legal change, it’s just that the cost of repairs has gone up.
> If I have to repair my toaster, and it contains a microcontroller, then I can buy that microcontroller but not the firmware.
More to my point. Why firmware vendor X can’t enforce copyright but Google can? We either have right to repair and no copyright (at least for code), or we have copyright for code and no right to repair.
Or you know, we could have an exemption on binary firmware for repair, like we have have for fair use. We could mandate manufacturers to provide it like we mandate them to provide user manuals.
There's other tractor manufacturers, farmers don't have to use JD.
Another point is JD is far more than just tractors so if you run a farm you will have many large pieces of equipment which you paid millions for so not so easy to just go and buy new stuff.
I have a bunch of different colours in my shed. The only appreciable difference I've noticed is that when I needed the service manual to fix something, the CaseIH dealer slapped a book down in front of me. The tech at the Deere dealer had to enter a password on a computer to decrypt it for me. Neither seemed terribly concerned about providing the information, though.
I'm curious, however, how much (in practical terms) John Deere would have to give or open up in terms of trade secrets in order to enable repairs (especially of super advanced stuff like fully autonomous farming), and to what extent they would need to open things up that offshore competitors might easily clone without having invested the millions (or billions?) that John Deere has already invested.
Put another way, right now, today, we have a farming equipment manufacturer based in the U.S. that is actually injecting some serious tech into a rather staid industry. John Deere seems to be turning into a highly innovative tech mfg company, in, ironically, one of the most expensive places to run a heavy equipment manufacturer.
I view them as a huge asset, developing what appears to be interesting ideas in what was a pretty tech-adverse industry, and fully automated farming is probably also a key component for food security across the globe, U.S. national security, international stability, and probably needs to be a part of any climate change conversation.
So, how much are we asking them to give up of their know-how where it might be cloned or worked-around by other companies?
In the immortal words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, "You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you wanna sell it."
What if FOTMA or Yucheng Dadi Machinery Co (https://sdycdadi.en.made-in-china.com/product/EvdncAtVZXkZ/C...) or something like that decide to clone the most advanced John Deere tractors with their new access?
If you are buying a quarter-million-dollar John Deere combine, you have probably already evaluated the rest of the industry and decided that the draconian DRM or whatever they're using is worth that very substantial investment. It's not like you might have just been browsing in the store for a $1 bottle of shampoo -- I'm sure you can't be a farmer without knowing, in detail, about this unable-to-repair problem with John Deere specifically, and might have even formed some strong opinions about it!
And if you decide that it's not worth it, then you would choose something else.. the market would punish John Deere for their overstep. (I'm not a farmer and have zero contact with this industry, but it seems that the Indian company Mahindra has pretty competitive pricing from a quick browse of tractor dealerships.) You could also sue John Deere if they were delivering a vehicle that wasn't performing according to their specifications, and ultimately their reputation would suffer. (It took thirty years for American auto mfgs to rebuild their reputation after the garbage they made way back in the 70's.)
The other thing where the market would help to fix this, without needing a legislative fix, is if a competitor steps up with an easy to repair tractor, like https://frame.work/ did for laptops. If this is a real problem, then some smart entrepreneur eventually will, even if they end up having their first tractors built in China. John Deere relies on the trust of farmers just as much as the other way around.
Just some food for thought. This seems to be a nuanced and very emotional issue for some people, but it does seem like there are at least two sides to this story.
If you don't want to pay John Deere for their fancy autonomous farming, that's fine. But you should be able to swap in a different control unit and not have to worry about your tractor simply refusing to run like a Keurig machine that refuses to run non-rfid tagged genuine k-cups.
Voids your warranty, sure, but I think you should be able to make that decision for yourself.
Farming like almost every other industry is has been under massive consolidation pressure for the last several decades, small and medium farms being bought out by large corporations.
These large corporations have no problem with these changes at JD because they do not want to repair their tractors anyway, they outsource that to the dealers now.
These changes however do drive up the costs for independent farmers which the Corporate farms love because then they can either drive them out of business or buy them cheap...
None... "Security" and "Trade Secrets" are largely red herrings to muddy the conversation and provide convenient cover for their true objective, anti-repair, or protectionism for their dealer network.
They can implement repairablity, api's and a whole host of other things to individual purchasers and independent repair with out sacrificing security or compromising trade secrets
I seen a similar argument about Apple repair manuals , there is even more stupid since Apple sends in China the full blueprints to build the iPhones so there is no fucking way that making the repair tools and manuals public gives China,Russia or N Koreea something they can't already get.
DRM would only make sense if you rent the product so the owner would not want to let a random dude to change stuff, but if you are the owner then you should be able to read the error codes and have a competent person replace a part.
TL:DR the repair tools and manuals do not contain trade secrets, the argument is flawed.
- Allow people to buy genuine replacement parts at the same or similar pricing to what the OEM pays
- Publish information on what parts go where on the device and how to install them
- Don't make the device lock itself if it detects the user has replaced a device
None of this in and of itself implicates John Deere's ability to ship a competitive product or prevent cloning. My understanding is that other manufacturers would already have the ability and know-how to take their competitors' products apart and figure out how they work. Not being able to buy replacement parts or not having circuit board schematics doesn't really help stop that, because they can just buy the whole package and do their own reverse-engineering work from there. If you have competitors that can't do that, then they probably couldn't build a clone even if these companies were extremely repair-friendly.
That's pretty much exactly what is going on.