Alabama farmer sues John Deere for ‘right to repair’
al.com
al.com
If the government intervenes, it would undermine the free market. But you could argue it's already undermined, both by the government itself and the fact that somehow John Deere managed to achieve a monopoly in a sector critical to national security.
Good. Sometimes we need regulation, otherwise bankers would crash the economy while getting bailouts with taxpayer money, workers would be paid below minimum wage, child labor would be rampant, and so on. The government is supposed to represent the people, although clearly money is the real voting power today. I'd like to see John Deere get sued into bankruptcy and laws set in place to avoid predatory techniques like this moving forward. I'm not hopeful though, and the stock market has certainly voted in favor of John Deere.
I honestly can't tell if this is meant to be satire.
and I get it they want to increase their profit. Even if a company wanted to dispose it properly he won't be able to offer competitive prices if nobody else does it
The government stepped in and decided that it would not let a company fail as "the market decided" it should, but instead it should change that outcome and spend money to keep these failed companies running. This is certainly not a case of the market running itself.
Ignoring the massive regulations on banks and inter dependency between banking and fiscal and economic policy for a minute, you might say "oh but the market did run itself and these banks crashed and it would have been bad for society if that were to happen so the government had to step in". But that's how all regulation is justified.
I think that's where the other comments are coming from anyway. But I'm not sure it's entirely fair, because I think it's not unreasonable to say some amount of regulation makes sense to prevent problems that would require more invasive and costly regulation or intervention later.
In other words, heap big regulation bad not mean little regulation bad.
It's not a statement that some people don't argue with, but it doesn't seem to be a question that without Glass-Stegal removal, the 2008 crisis would have not spread as far as it did.
*or even subsidising a lack of crops
People speculating on food prices/availablity (or even worse, hoarding it to influence price) is usually not taken very kindly by the population or goverment because of the results in massive social upheaval.
Food is actually subsidized to an extent, because not having your basic needs met usually results in massive undermining of the power of the state.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/cha...
Haha, free market! Hilarious!
Do they actually have a monopoly?
> Deere & Co. is the largest farm equipment corporation in the world, selling twice as much machinery as its two next-largest competitors combined. Deere controls 53 percent of the U.S. market for large tractors and 60 percent of the U.S. market for farm combines. These sub-sectoral monopolies help explain Deere’s 18 percent share of the overall farming equipment market, the largest of any corporation in a market where the four largest operators control 45 percent of all sales.
> Deere has also bought up dominant producers of heavy machinery in other sectors. It purchased the largest road construction equipment maker in the world for $5 billion in 2017, and the world’s largest timber harvesting machinery company for an undisclosed sum in 2000.
> Deere did not come by this control honestly. It bought market share, used public resources to capture private profit, and engineered elaborate financial shell games to hide its profits from U.S. tax authorities.
> Having negated meaningful competitive pressures, Deere does what monopolists everywhere do: It abuses its size advantage to bully competitors, customers, and workers, prioritizing shareholder interests over all others.
In the US, they have a monopoly in certain markets. Note that anti-trust regulators don't use the layman definition of monopoly, either. The definition they use is a company with significant and durable market power, such as having the ability to raise prices or exclude competition[2].
[1] https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/cheat-to-win-the-j...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
The monopoly is in repairing their own goods, not on the tractor market. Usually the debate for right to repair includes the argument that repairing a good should be a competitive market on its own. The definition of the market is key (is it the tractor market or the repair of John Deer tractors market). If it's the first, debatable on the monopoly. If it's the second, clearly a monopoly.
I do recognize you were responding to the OP's claim that John Deer is a monopoly, not to the article's description of it. But I wanted to mention the article's description as related to right to repair.
The "free market" without regulation is mythic ideal that's never actually existed. Regulations are necessary to maintain healthy markets, and markets rely on states to enforce the terms that make trade and markets possible.
Merging with competition allows both players to charge more without providing greater value, which is always the best option for both players.
There is actually a lot of debate about what causes this.
The argument on one side is, of course companies unconstrained by laws would collude with each other to fix prices etc.
The argument on the other side is, as soon as they start doing this it becomes profitable for someone else to enter the market. Is the cartel charging $40 for something that should cost $20? Go around to all the customers and tell them you'll sell to them for $25 tomorrow if they agree to a long-term contract today to buy from you at that price. Then you have enough guaranteed customers to pay off your new factory, so you can build it without being bankrupted by the incumbents slashing prices. And because anyone can do this, the incumbents don't collude to charge $40 to begin with because they know they would invite it.
Under this theory, monopolies form because of regulatory capture. The large incumbents don't want to compete in a commodity market, so they pay off the government to erect barriers to entry. Then once no one new can enter the market, they can buy each other or collude or use conscious parallelism without risk of new competitors.
It seems to me that it's kind of both. Without the second one, companies would rarely if ever get big enough that no one could compete with them. But once they are, somebody's got to break them up.
Most importantly, we need to fix the regulatory environment so that it facilitates rather than impairs competition, or it will just happen again.
This argument seems tenuous. I see the customer's risk. Where is your risk?
A source with details of this argument would also help. If you have are an economist, please mention it - I'll take the argument more seriously on your say-so.
The purpose of the contract is to reduce your risk. The original problem was that if you built the factory intending to sell for $25, the incumbents could reduce the price to $20 or $15, i.e. below your cost. Then you could never recover your initial investment and the high probability of that happening would deter you from entering the market to begin with.
The customer takes the risk because if you don't enter the market, they're paying $40 to the incumbents.
> If you have are an economist, please mention it - I'll take the argument more seriously on your say-so.
Professional economists have a reputation that compares disfavorably with psychics and astrologers. If an economist gives you your horoscope, make sure to get a second opinion. If the second opinion is from another economist, expect it to be different.
"The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Where this serves as an instance of irrationality is that the investors in Match keep allowing them to spend money acquiring more products to ruin, as if This Time Things Will Be Different. What they ought to do is spin off what they already own with the hopes that someone less incompetent could potentially un-ruin some of them.
The core functionality of these apps is very cheap to build, ideally these apps should be near free.
What match.com does is capture the network. When a new cheap and better network appears, they offer the founders the kind of cash that simply cannot be earned by running their original network. For eg, okcupid was free. There was no way to make money from it. And then as per their plan - they ruin it.
1) Make a non-ruined dating product.
2) Get users. Should be easy because the incumbents are intentionally ruined and turnover is high.
3) Profit. (Match Group buyout)
Worst case they run out of money and you have a successful dating product which continues to siphon their users because it's the non-ruined one.
Not sure why it's so hard to make money from something like that. Sell flowers and chocolate and movie tickets to a captive audience. Do promotions for entertainment venues. Be Groupon for dating stuff.
The math you are proposing simply doesn't work.
Then why aren't they asking for more money? Match Group to maintain their $30B enterprise has to buy you out or you by being a non-ruined dating site will destroy their entire company by out-competing them. That should be worth substantially more than 1% of the company. (It also seems to be that it is; Tinder got $3B.)
Match Group owns more than 45 subsidiaries. Obviously the size of the network necessary to be viable would support more than one other challenger. But if there were 15 each of size similar to their own subsidiaries, they'd still have to buy all of them or whichever ones they didn't buy would continue to eat their market share by being non-ruined, and then have to be bought for a higher price later.
Match makes shitty products optimized for revenue. Good dating products optimized for users have low revenue and valuation. Match acquires virtually all of them and keeps its monopoly alive and thriving.
There is no point arguing with reality.
The question is, how does that turn out? The theory says people should keep creating dating products to make Match buy, because it costs less to do than they have to pay. That doesn't mean it happens instantaneously. It doesn't mean they can't buy some of them. But it's an evolutionary process. They buy the ones they can buy, until one shows up they can't. Maybe because there are too many of them. Maybe one gets too big too fast. Maybe the owners are some stubborn purists who refuse to sell. It hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't.
Apparently Facebook is getting into the dating game. They already have the network effect and Match doesn't have the money to buy them. Facebook sucks, but now where's your monopoly?
And what's to stop FB dating from sucking. So the final solution is to replace one monopoly with an even bigger one? That's just talking out of both sides of the mouth.
The Phoebus cartel[1] existed for quite some time, and its operation contradicts this argument. They captured the world-wide light bulb market with agreements between manufacturers. It took WWII to put a dent in it.
Today, you can look at the price fixing that happens in the mobile app store and payments markets. 99% of each market is dominated by a two company duopoly. Prices in those markets have remained steady for over a decade, and any changes to pricing and terms are adopted in lockstep between Google and Apple. They've effectively captured 15% to 30% of all revenue collected in mobile apps.
Neither cartel relied on regulatory capture, but both cartels recognized that without collusion, it would be a race to the bottom if they compete on price, so they became complicit in ensuring that doesn't happen. It only costs so much to make a light bulb, download an app or process payments.
They had intended the cartel to last for thirty years (1925 to 1955). The cartel ceased operations in 1939 owing to the outbreak of World War II.
So they didn't actually last all that long.
Both organisations co-ordinated the trading of patents and market penetration.
Patents are a government-granted monopoly.
> Neither cartel relied on regulatory capture
This is not remotely true for Apple and Google. The laws are written to allow them to exclude competitors. Why doesn't Amazon buy a bunch of iPhones and modify the software to include the Amazon App Store and then sell them to customers? Laws prohibit this.
And then it's the same situation again -- copyright too is a government-granted monopoly. Finding that a monopoly exists where the government prohibits anyone from competing with them was the original theory. Let's have 14 year copyrights again and see how the monopoly holds up when Apple has to compete with a fork of the original iPhone which would be out of copyright by now.
To prevent this the incumbents could go in and undercut you before you actually build anything, but that's not much of a cartel anymore then. Anyone could "compete with them" just by threatening to raise funding.
It seems rather disingenuous to make such fantastically bold claims as statements of understood fact. I can't imagine what sort of dialog you were hoping to encourage.
Economic orthodoxy, in all cases I've ever encountered, do not support your claim.
My point is, markets do include government regulation. Academic debate is not centered on whether or not markets include government regulation by microeconomics definition. The debate is how much, where, when and how. If "free market" is defined as no government intervention, it is not an accepted practice and even conservative economists would not recommend it. I think there is a reason the term "free market" is not included in my microeconomics textbook. We look for a competitive market (described by the desired result), not a "free market" (described by the methods, not the result).
[1] Mankiw, Principle of Microeconomics 8th edition
To the government: i) they get a ton of John Deere lobbying dollars, ii) John Deere can always loom the potential of lost jobs over politicians' heads, iii) Farmers are not happy yet still begrudgingly using the system so things are not totally falling apart.... and, of course, iv) this matter doesn't really effect politicians personally.
There is no free market in the US. The US economy is cronyism where all the elites play golf together / marry among themselves, trying to only pass the minimum regalation to perpetuate the system / silence the People and where laws is actually to maximize their own interest.
I'm 100% sure a federal Right-to-repair bill will actually strengthen the actual system (ie. bill does the exact opposite of its name)
If "custom contracts that give access and custody but have constraints" are the sort of thing the free market enables, it should be undermined. People are supposed to own things. This "you own nothing" bullshit needs to end.
The market isn't free if the government enforces private contracts. Once we stop humoring those who pretend we have anything resembling a free market we can begin to debate what other forms of government intervention in markets are desirable.
It may be that companies are becoming more capable of doing so in these grand ways as software eats everything and they can use copyright law to continue to exert ownership over part of what they sold you.
They have a reputation for reliability, so do many other brands. Kubota, Deutz, Fent, Massy, Case, New Holland... a bunch more.
It's amazing the brand loyalty hold JD have on farmers.
Let's get closer to home: why do people buy Windows and Apples, despite a fair few free (really free) alternatives?
John Deere is not unique. All common rail engines require a visit from a "certified engineer" who has access to the software. This is terrible in the marine industry where you can't get one in the middle of the ocean and you can't repair yourself either. What do you do? Do you sail to a harbor? You can't unless you have a sailboat. Get a tow to the nearest Volvo/Yanmar dealer? You must be kidding, thousand of miles away?
So yes, that lawsuit makes sense.
As for a class action lawsuit some of the comments in the thread misunderstand how it works: 1. Secure one or two plaintiffs. Two or three is better. Make sure they represent owners well: no conflicts, not paid to sue, good/clean plaintiffs. 2. Find the right location for the lawsuit. Location is very important in the US. Not only the state but the county. This is VERY important. Good plaintiff lawyers know where to sue. 3. Get your judge to certify the class action. "this lawsuit is on behalf of all users of John Deere tractors, etc". This is ALSO very important. John Deere will fight that. They will claim that those two plaintiffs do not represent the class, blabla. 4. Fight in court. Other plaintiffs have nothing to do. If the class action lawsuit wins on behalf of thousands of owners this represents a lot of money. It costs nothing to plaintiffs. Lawyers typically get 30%, sometimes less. If they are too greedy (they all are) the judge may object and cut down the fees. 5. Users can “opt out” of the payment if John Deere loses in court after appeals. Most plaintiffs do not opt out because they can’t afford to fight big corporations.
Unfortunately corporations are not always fair. We have seen many, many cases when poor farmer John just could not pay the exorbitant costs imposed by John Deere. Understand that these people have learned to be self-sufficient. They weld their broken massive tools in the field. They call the mobile repair shop to fix and tune their engines. Now they can't do anything. That massive, expensive John Deer is like a beached whale. Nothing you can do about it.
Hence class action lawsuits in the US. Some of them are abusive (i.e.recent att phone bills, 100M customers collect $1, lawyers collect $30M), but sometimes there are no other ways (asbestos, workplace injuries, brain damage near chemical waste from mining). Folks outside the US struggle to understand the system.
It is why today you can enjoy Non-Apple store repairs to your phone, non OEM parts for your car or non branded cartridges for your printer.
I wish that such a lawsuit will force John Deere to change its practices, like it forced other companies to do so.
The EPA also doesn't like the idea of people making things not pass emissions.
This https://www.wep-inc.com/inspection-maintenance-programs/texa... is hilarious. You arent testing car emissions, you are reading car computer self report.
In EU, NZ/AU and probably many more places Tailpipe gas emissions test is routine. There are even mobile units with portable Emissions measurement systems. Meanwhile even California doesnt mandate tailpipe tests :o
When I press people on what parts of their tractors they can't do now it generally comes down to something that would make the tractor not pass emissions if it was tested. Parts and computer test equipment is readily available.
US on the other hand legislated computer DRM "for engines" because its cheaper/faster, anything beyond is a super special case. My favorite is actual tailpipe test commercial trucks must pass in NY - they test opacity of gas aka "is the smoke visible?" :o and look for physical presence of all mandated emission hardware for that model/year/exemption status. All of that theater instead of using proper exhaust gas analyzers.
>Parts and computer test equipment is readily available.
Can you download standalone John Deere service software? or did you mean signing up for their paid SAAS package?
But step back - how is any of that morally right? Why should people have to fight corporation in court to get a basic right to repair the thing they bought? Its insane!
Surely, if there was any sense to this, the presumption would be in favour of the purchaser by default! Regardless of any service contract or other legal agreement. That it should be for the corporation to argue in court that there are some special circumstances that mean that default ruling does not apply, even though you bought (not rented) their product.
The fact it is this way round tells you all you need to know. At best, the consumer can waste time (10 years?) and money (lots) to hopefully (but perhaps not) prove the obvious case. OTOH, there is no incentive for the corporation not to try the dirtiest most unfriendly tactics they think they can get away with. Esp. if they have a near monopoly in their domain (eg John Deere).
For this reason and others, I see governance and law as captured entities - they are captured by corporations and we the consumers are there to have our wealth extracted from while retaining very few rights. Frankly, it is neo-feudalism. Or fascism (corporate+government together).
Out of their greed; John Deere will fight this with all they have.
I still think the best solution to this is still a startup that can create tractors that don’t require repairs by a first party. I understand the difficulties behind such an operation, but I’m unfortunately not sure how successful such a lawsuit will be in America without the hell of a lot more ‘ooomph’ behind it.
An "open tractor" from a new company is also going to be hard to justify with how thin margins are with farming.
Maybe some techies can get together to make repair easier. New electronic control boards, diagrams of how to machine their own replacement parts, etc. for the most popular tractors people own.
It's a tough problem to solve, but one worth fighting any way we can.
You're still going up against massively entrenched and influential opposition that could likely undercut a startup's prices and then raise them again once the competition dies.
We saw it with the rideshare companies. Their business models are flexible enough to take losses when necessary in order to beat out alternatives and then programmatically raise the prices again once they've captured the market again.
> That’s a hard nut to crack because any open competition is fighting from a seeming price disadvantage.
What other markets are there, where new entrants face the same problem?
Do other tractor manufacturers have Deere-style DRM? I imagine some don't.
Edit: Well, it appears there is something like this already. "Crowd Justice" https://www.crowdjustice.com/
* applying to all products, not just ag
* allowing my choice of parts
* allow me or my choice of shop to work on it
* no cryptographic DRM'ed parts
* access to schematics, shop manuals, and admin/interface softwareFTFY.
Seriously though, the point isn't that there are alternatives, but that one should have the right to repair whatever machine they own.
I absolutely endorse Mahindra but if youre outside TN theyre kinda hard to come by. the tractors are less reliable than more modern western designs but faster and easier to repair by far. new head seals rocker arms valve guide seals and an oil change was 6 hours of labor and i actually started to enjoy it. bolts are over-built for what you need in some cases. the gyrovator has some of the beefiest engine mounts ive come across in a long time (looking at you Western Star)
im sure every one comes with a free "you dont want that" from the usual scumbags at the dealer but if you have an engine lift you can service your own Jivo very easily from tip to tail. the only reason our shop saw one was because the owner couldnt safely work on the engine (gyrovator series) as he was 71 years old.
How do Kubota and Mahindra compare side-by-side?
I lived in a area where there were a lot of small and fairly poor farmers. I also had a machine shop. You can see where this is going: come harvest time tons of stuff that had been sitting for a year suddenly had to work 16 hours per day and predictably quite a bit of it would break in the field, usually simple stuff, bearings, shafts, welds. So once word got around that I was an ok welder with a machine shop every year a couple of farmers would find their way to my door with broken balers, older harvesters and s on. Fixing those would keep us in produce and meat for months. But I never ran into a Mahindra, though they were in use.
My Massey Ferguson has some offerings, but not nearly as many as those two. It’s similar for the other also-rans: New Holland, Kioti, Mahindra, RK, Bronson, and so on.
This sounds similar to the contrast between older and newer cars too; the older ones were designed to last with periodic scheduled maintenance, whereas newer ones are designed to have no maintenance for their "design life", after which it's difficult to repair.
It’s hard for an area to support more than a few dealerships because this equipment isn’t rotated out very often (10-20 years?).
It’s hard to unseat an entrenched player, but loss of right to repair is a big step towards an upstart moving in.
Earlier today there was a thread about e-bike battery prices (tl'dr they're ridiculous expensive). I really wish rechargeable batteries had interchangeable form factors like normal batteries. I can't help but feel that if AA batteries were invented today there's no way there'd be a standard form factor.
But this issue is complicated. As much as first-party parts and accessories cost too much, there can be deadly consequences with shoddy third party products [1]:
> In July, a Chinese woman died after being electrocuted from a charging iPhone 5. Later that week, another man in China suffered a similar injury from a charging iPhone 4, leaving him comatose. In both cases, the victims were using an unofficial third-party adapter to charge their device.
So how do you guarantee something third-party will do what it claims to? If you use bad RAM chips in a Macbook, the consumer is going to blame Apple not whoever supplied cheap, shoddy parts (for the record, I hate soldered in RAM).
As an aside, I was unsurprised to see in this article this is a small farm. The harsh truth is that family farms and small farms in general are a dying way of life and just aren't competitive with industrial-scale agriculture. You can't fight the incoming tide forever.
[1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/28/thai-man-dies-aft...
If this is a counterfeit Apple charger, then yes. If this is a charger that was purchased from Apple as the distributor, then yes.
However, if this was a 3rd party charger purchased from a street vendor or online merchant (that has difficulties with counterfeit products) that could be used for anything from the cat water fountain pump to an Apple iPhone - then no.
You don't. There's something called freedom and personal responsibility. Unfortunately the corporations and governments seem quite determined to take them away from us.
Small rant about those since I missed the earlier thread today: It's even worse. They are stupidly expensive yes, but even if you source them yourself they will cost you another 100 dollar/euro/pound to "enable". It's DRM for batteries and serves no real purpose except price gouging. If you rip out the 18650 cells (which are in almost all detachable models which is the majority) and replace them you have to re-enable the device. If the battery somehow drains "completely" and you are able to get it out of safe mode, which is quite possible since the battery isn't actually dead, you have to go to a dealer and pay the surcharge as well. There are plenty of good second hand models available which are useless due to the battery DRM since the price of the battery will be about 3-5 times the bike.
> So how do you guarantee something third-party will do what it claims to? If you use bad RAM chips in a Macbook, the consumer is going to blame Apple not whoever supplied cheap, shoddy parts (for the record, I hate soldered in RAM).
Just like when your car goes to a garage and doesn't work afterwards: the person who 'fixed' it. I can't get it in my head why people think this will be different for other things than cars.
This is my concern too, but, I think way more broadly than you.
I love the idea of right to repair. I agree on a fundamental level, this is your device, you bought it, you own it, you should be able to do with it as you please.
What I don't agree with is creating additional regulatory or legislative burdens on companies. I have a number of concerns with doing so, but, philosophically I don't see it as the government's right to unduly interfere in apple (or samsung, or john deere's) right to sell me a product I want to buy.
More directly, I am worried about right to repair stifling innovation and competition. I could easily see a regulatory body require all phone's have user-replaceable batteries and that is not something which I fundamentally want in a phone. It has tradeoffs which I don't want to make.
That said, I think companies like Apple refusing to sell genuine replacement parts at any price is egregious.
However, I also think the government forcing private companies to disclose things like engineering or repair manuals which contain secret/trade information is equally egregious.
All of this is a long way around to saying that while I love the concept of right to repair, the devil is in the details and I haven't seen anyone really enumerate the details of what they'd actually like to put into law.
Am I wrong and is there anyone with actual proposed legislation?
They largely do. For example, the famous 18650 which powers all kinds of devices from power banks to laptops to cars.
If what you’re referring to is their common inclusion into proprietary battery packs, there are some technical reasons for that difference, like cell balancing, safety protections, etc. While it could be possible to engineer some (but not all) of these concerns out of the equation, you’d end up with a more expensive larger and heavier product.
I modded my car and it didn't void the warranty. I can goto the dealership, 3rd party, or repair it myself. I can swap out nearly everything for non OEM parts.
If tractors were able to be classified as cars for warranty and such - such that the people who make modifications to them are liable for damages caused by the device (rather than the manufacturer), there wouldn't be as much of an issue.
As it is, if you are able to modify the emissions controls for a tractor and the manufacturer doesn't try to make it impossible to do that, the EPA goes after the manufacturer instead of the owner or operator.
In the mean time, see if you can legally make any changes to your car's catalytic converter and replace it with a pipe.
I'd argue they are industrial safety-critical equipment.
> In the mean time, see if you can legally make any changes to your car's catalytic converter and replace it with a pipe.
Nobody goes after Subaru when people run catless. This is a silly strawman.
Exactly - the government doesn't go after Subaru when people remove their catalytic converter because the car isn't industrial equipment. The EPA does go after tractor manufacturers and distributors when it is possible to modify a tractor to remove its diesel particulate filters and similar.
https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/tractor-supply-company-inc-s...
> According to the charges, the company's engine software controls the timing of fuel injection into the combustion chamber, causing the engine to emit excessive amounts of NOx while the truck is running on the open road. However, the company's engine software is designed in such a way so that these emission levels do not show up on the federal test.
What do any of these have to do with end users modifying their equipment?
For starters, it's not aftermarket! since the tractor belongs to JD, and it is licensed to the customer, and it failed to work because a wire got wet (shitty design), and only JD can determine and repair it ... that should be JD's cost, not the owner's.
>harsh truth
A harsher one: JD has a monopoly and is using it to strangle its own small business customers. Feels good to see it get run past Sherman - better to see it get run over.
> that should be JD's cost, not the owner's.
https://www.biren.com/blog/2020/september/defective-machiner...
In particular https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1200/1245...
> The [misuse/ [or] modification] was so highly extraordinary that it was not reasonably foreseeable to [name of defendant], and therefore should be considered as the sole cause of [name of plaintiff]’s harm.
So, if it was foreseeable that a 3rd party may modify some equipment in some way, the manufacturer must specifically warn the purchaser about "don't do that."
With software, this becomes a much more difficult challenge.
Additionally, https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1200/1244...
> [Name of defendant] claims that [he/she/nonbinary pronoun/it] is notresponsible for any harm to [name of plaintiff] based on a failure to warn because [name of plaintiff] is a sophisticated user of the [product]. To succeed on this defense, [name of defendant] must prove that, at the time of the injury, [name of plaintiff], because of [his/her/nonbinary pronoun]particular position, training, experience, knowledge, or skill, knew or should have known of the [product]’s risk, harm, or danger.
So with software, either the user is a sophisticated user and aware of the implications of installing their own patches on the system and what that could do (over fertilize a field because of an incorrect setting on the gps calibration)... or they aren't. If they aren't a sophisticated user of the system, then it should be locked down sufficiently to prevent those changes.
> “The sophisticated user defense concerns warnings. Sophisticated users ‘arecharged with knowing the particular product’s dangers.’ ‘The rationale supporting the defense is that “the failure to provide warnings about risks already known to a sophisticated purchaser usually is not a proximate cause of harm resulting from those risks suffered by the buyer’s employees or downstream purchasers.”
So are we expecting farmers to be software engineers too?
https://www.mcguirewoods.com/news-resources/publications/us-...
It has similar Misuse or Alteration of Product defense... but...
https://ggrmlawfirm.com/blog/personal-injury/car-customizati...
> A hobbyist who does his or her own customization work often assumes the risk that some part of the work wasn’t completed correctly. Making changes to a car in a way that renders the car unsafe could expose the hobbyist to liability for any resulting injuries. Absent insurance that specifically covers it, the hobbyist could be left bearing all of the cost of the ensuing litigation and compensation to injured parties.
It is the hobbyist that has the liability. So if you change your car's ECU its you that are liable when it gets in a wreck, not the car company for having a faulty product.
For industrial equipment, that doesn't exist. If you can make a change to the industrial equipment and the equipment manufacturer doesn't try to stop you, the equipment manufacturer is likely liable for damages.
There's a powerpoint (awkward to read in a web browser - "Product Liability Law in the Farm Equipment Industry" from agrability.org also as part of a recorded webinar at https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY ). 11:33 talks about Strict Liability and 19:24 talks about farm equipment being "reasonably safe". The case studies are also interesting - pay attention at 42:23 where it points out who is paying for the injury.
So put it into the agreement? I don't see how this is an onerous barrier; if companies can force arbitration based on the sales agreement, they should be able to (within reason) dodge liability for the effects of modifications they didn't approve.
> Liability insurance premiums remain a tremendous burden for businesses in many industries. Legislation aimed at limiting liability, enacted just last year, has been declared unconstitutional. Moreover, some U.S. courts are moving toward standards that will actually increase liability, even for businesses not at fault under the traditional legal doctrines.
Secondly, consider who is bound by this agreement? The person who purchased it? or the person who is operating it? Watch the video that I linked - https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY . The case study begins at 21:43 with a Massey tractor and a Brush Hog mower. Pay close attention to the design in the guarding claims at 33:48 and the lessons at 43:17.
Product liability for industrial equipment can't just be signed away by the person purchasing it.
Don't get me wrong - I am for right to repair. It has impacts across many areas including national security, food security, and hobbyist interest. But I believe that we need to revisit product liability for industrial equipment when that comes into place... and when self driving cars come out and if you are allowed to load your own software on the car who do you think will be liable for a crash under current law? Who is responsible for showing that the (destroyed) vehicle had software modifications that went beyond the legally allowed changes (emissions, top speed, acceleration, etc...)?
I am for right to repair - I am concerned that the approaches that right to repair is using now ignores existing law and liabilities and will result in a much higher legal costs for manufacturers for repairs that they are forced to allow until the corresponding laws catch up to place the liability for changes to equipment back on the people who make and install those after market changes. And that in turn will cause a limiting of innovation and advancement in those areas and rolling back of other advancements to the point where the manufacturer can reasonably assume liability for changes that the purchaser may make.
If that 3rd party firmware overapplied fertilizer - JD would be liable. If the auto driving feature was modified and ran out into the road and killed someone, JD would be liable.
Product liability for industrial equipment falls in different category than other product liabilities and all industrial equipment (including tractors) are classified as "unreasonably dangerous" and it is the responsibility of the manufacturer to prevent 3rd party modifications that may result in damages that could have been foreseen with the existing setup.
If John Deer allows someone to change the software, then it is foreseeable that anything that is software controlled may be changed and behave in a way that is unintended... and John Deer is liable unless they prevent that software change.
This is not necessary. We can choose to not do this. Also "could have been foreseen" carries a lot of water here. These products shouldn't be unsafe to make minor repairs on any more than they should be unsafe to operate.
If folks actually value "right to repair" support companies that offer right to repair.
If no tractor company exists that offer the type of open setup you want and you think this is critical - start a company up and take out Deere and others.
Deere's views on software changes by users in the field is pretty darn clear.
My own view - having watched individuals and dealers etc "tune" trucks etc (with all the endless problems involved) - is that for something like a 10,000 part count + heavy piece of equipment - Deere is going to want to keep stuff locked up tight to preserve brand value. Apple has done this with iphones, and the resale value after 5 years on an iphone is incredible compared to players pushing out android phones.
we need regulation. force companies to provide a minimum standard of repairability.
E.g., US8874261 mentioned in this article:
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/02/18/john-deere-patents-hyb...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8874261B2/en?oq=8874261
Claim 1 from that patent:
A method for operating a mobile robot, the method comprising:
- Collecting range data of one or more objects in an environment around the robot;
- Identifying uniquely identifiable ones of the objects as navigation landmarks:
- Storing a reference map of the navigation landmarks based on the collected range data;
- Establishing a list or sequence of way points for the robot to visit, each way point defined with reference to one or more landmarks;
- Reading a message on a tag posted at or near one or more way points; and
- Managing a task based on the read message.
When this claim was granted by the USPTO, John Deere was given exclusive rights to the general concept of robot navigation between waypoiints with the addition of "reading a message on a tag" and acting accordingly. To the layman this language sounds specific enough, but those skilled in the art (or in possession of an HN user name) will recognize it as Turing equivalence. Indeed, the next few claims make it clear that ownership of the idea of conditional execution of tasks at waypoints is exactly the goal of the patent.
So, good luck building a competing farm implement that actually does anything useful. The "innovators" at Deere have made sure that you can do no such thing for the next 12 years.
(I should point out that IANAL, so if there are instances in which this isn't strictly correct, it'd be interesting to learn about them. Downvoting without comment doesn't enlighten anyone.)
I will say that my point largely stands, though: the leaf nodes of this particular DAG are places where you will almost inevitably end up if you want to implement robotic farm machinery. Deere averages a couple hundred patents a year, so if you don't step on this specific land mine, another one will get you.
The car companies, threatened by having to comply with different laws in different states, came to an agreement that the car companies would follow the Massachusetts law across the US.
You can watch individuals and dealers etc "tune" trucks now as a direct consequence of that 10 year old law passing.
There's no obligation for the law to preserve brand value when considering an anti-monopoly case. Standard Oil wasn't broken apart because of gung-ho oil companies.