We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership | Hacker News Reader

We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

wired.com

578 pointsklunger394 comments

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen.

As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights.

As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them.

When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms.

I remember reading Stallman's short story "The Right to Read" in the 1990s. I found it alarmist and completely unrealistic. I read it today and am forced to recognize that Stallman was exactly right.

The real problem here isnt that we're leasing things (we have leases for cars, houses, and many other physical goods). The problem is that the manufacturers mix leasing and owning. I.e. you own the device, but lease the software. I think that everyone would be radically happier if you either leased everything or owned everything. This is partly because when we buy something at a store, we expect to own it, not own part of it and lease the rest. This leads to the price of the object being higher than what you would actually pay if you were going to only lease it. In a world where nobody owns tractors and just leases them, we would still be fine because nobody would pay full price for a tractor every month, but rather only what would make sense economically.

I don't think it's that either. I think it's that laws exist to protect "intellectual property," which leads to a lot of bizarre consequences that don't occur with laws protecting traditional physical property. A lease on a physical good like a car is not particularly strange. It's just a contract that allows the lessee to use a scarce physical item that belongs to the lessor under certain terms.

If we had that kind of lease on software, but without IP laws, there still wouldn't be any strange legal consequences. The lessee gets the software, and perhaps the terms say that the lessee cannot copy or modify the software. The difference is that if the lessee does distribute a copy of the software, the lessor cannot go after third parties who download those copies, because they haven't signed any sort of lease or contract. The lessor can go after the lessee, of course, but that's it.

This latter description shouldn't be described as an "attack on ownership" any more than renting a car from the airport is an attack on ownership. The real attack on ownership is the existence of IP laws. You own your hard drive, but only until the hard drive happens to arrange some bits in a particular order.

> If we had that kind of lease on software, but without IP laws, there still wouldn't be any strange legal consequences. The lessee gets the software, and perhaps the terms say that the lessee cannot copy or modify the software. The difference is that if the lessee does distribute a copy of the software, the lessor cannot go after third parties who download those copies, because they haven't signed any sort of lease or contract. The lessor can go after the lessee, of course, but that's it.

The difficulty I see with the current and future legal landscape is that there's no clear distinction between right-to-modify and right-to-distribute.

It might be argued that this has been a willful conflation by IP owners in an attempt to best sell their agenda. (Right-to-modify-something-owned being substantially more in line with pre-digital norms)

My understanding was that the point of the DCMA's reasonable clauses was to clarify that yes, if you own something, you also own the right to modify it. Including the right to circumvent any artificial technical limits placed on your ability to modify. The tension has always been that modifiable devices can also strip technical protections from IP to enable distribution.

To me, I can't see how we end up with any alternative to the following two options (which I think the Stallman-position cardboard cutout would argue as well):

[World A] Users do not have a right to distribute IP. To ensure this, IP encrypted. Breaking IP encryption is illegal. To ensure breaking IP encryption is also impossible, modifying at least some portion of software/firmware/hardware in consumer devices is also illegal. To ensure modification is also impossible, technical measures are employed (aka "Nightmare TPM").

[World B] The legality of distributing IP is irrelevant. The legality of breaking IP encryption is irrelevant. Breaking IP encryption is feasible, because modifying the software/firmware/hardware of consumer devices is feasible.

The road to cyberpunk ethos was always that [World A] would be enacted legally (because money), while [World B] would be de facto reality (because consumers get creeped out by TPM and there are more hardware companies interested in selling units than vertically integrated IP stakeholders^).

^Bonus points for those who remember when Apple was the former rather than the latter

In a world where nobody owns tractors and just leases them...

Tractors manufactured in the 1960s are still in regular use today, to a far greater extent than e.g. automobiles of that era. Although there are regular improvements, the core task of pulling implements across a field has not changed, and the same giant piles of steel that function today should still function decades from now. The portion of tractor owners and users who would welcome the dystopia you envision is minuscule.

The confusion goes further. When you "buy" a kindle book, are you buying it or leasing it? It's still restricted, you can only put it where amazon says you can put it, so in my view that's leasing. Yet the button on the site says "Buy", and there's no other component involved.

At the very least the labeling laws should require clearly distinguishing between purchase and lease. If there's a part of the product that you're only leasing and not buying, the whole thing must say "lease" or "rent". It would be funny to see amazon forced to relabel their site like that though...

It's rabbithole. Owning a VHS tape recorder forbids you to use Betamax. Even when things become a standard you're still under the ecosystem diktat. Unless someone broaden the GNU manifesto and distribution to the physical world, where you could share means to create factories to produce anything you need on your own (pushing the debate onto matter, land and energy).

I feel like the term "lease" isn't appropriate unless there is a viable way and underlying plan to eventually return it. When I lease I car, I have to return it. They don't sell me the car under the auspices of a lease, with no way to ever return it, and still restrict my rights on what I can do with it.

Given enough time, software eventually becomes unsupported, and then -- perhaps after more time, but perhaps not -- unusable. In effect, this is the return at the end of the auto lease. It's not a perfect analogy (really nothing ever is), but it's pretty good, especially I think for people not used to thinking about this issue with software and other digital goods.

The question I have is what does ownership mean if the thing owned is useless without something that cannot be owned/must be leased and cannot be replaced?

Can you say that it's really owned if you can't separate the leased part and can't use the thing without the leased part?

I mean, sure, you're free to write any sort of contract you want, free market yadda yadda, but I think there's something meaningful in the point the article makes here...

Agreed — I thought about this carefully and I'd have no problem with a rental-type agreement for a car of a piece of machinery, as long as we all agree that it's a rental (and the pricing reflects it).

Tesla is another example of a company walking a thin line. I'd be OK with their software updates to the car, and I'd actually rather take this further: I am not into car repair and I just want to use the vehicle for transportation, so a rental/lease agreement is fine with me.

The same problem exists with many other devices that we seemingly "own". Phones are a good example: they are rapidly becoming computing devices that we "buy", but don't really own, as we can't use them without the software, which is "licensed". Again, not a huge problem for me in the case of a phone, but let's be clear that I don't really "own" much more than a decorated doorstop/brick. I really pay an upfront rental fee with the expectation of using the device for about 2-3 years.

Price is set by the market. The lease cost will match the purchase price today. It will all be the same for the consumer.

The mythical "free market" uninfringed upon by bad actors, and other fairy tales.

[citation needed]

Alarming is the proper way to describe it. I remember how I thought it would never happen that I would buy a book and have it deleted remotely from my device when it so pleased the bookstore. But it happened. Then I thought absurd how anyone could seriously believe that the NSA was massively spying on its citizens and performing surveillance "carpet bombing". But then lo, Snowden happened.

Time and time again it happened. And invariably, Stallman was right all along.

Stallman understands better than most the true nature of wealth and power. Concentrated wealth (in the hands of either individuals or corporations) becomes obsessed with maintaining the concentration of wealth. The most straight-forward way to do this is to never actually sell anything, but rather to collect rent on it. However, the right to collect rent is a legal right that must be enforced by the state (or by force of arms, otherwise).

Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law is focused on precisely the mechanism by which our society grants rent-collection privileges to concentrated wealth. His core principle is that we must proactively ensure that concentrated wealth is not permitted to collect rent on EVERYTHING in the world, or else we will all be made their serfs forever.

> Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law

Channeling Stallman here, there's no such thing as "intellectual property law". There are a bunch of laws that work in very different ways, evolved under different circumstances, and have different purposes. Copyrights are for ensuring authors retain economic and/or moral rights on their work, patents are so that inventors will disclose their inventions instead of keeping them as trade secrets, and trademarks are so that consumers don't get duped into buying the wrong product. There are other sets of laws that have other purposes and histories, such as regional designation or shipwright designs.

Lumping them all together as "intellectual property" promotes oversimplication and confusion.

Stallman himself is very well aware of this issue and has written about it: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

That's why he said "channeling Stallman"

And arguing endlessly about the language to use when it's not germane to the discussion is an ages-old rhetorical technique to attempt to frame the debate. Stallman might love freedom, but I suspect he loves winning arguments by being "clever" even more.

Actually, Stallman here is pointing out that the term "intellectual property" is an example of this "age-old rhetorical technique". Ditto for calling piracy "theft". It is very important what language we use because it determines the thoughts and emotions we have.

I don't mind the discussion of language semantics. I used the blanket term "intellectual property law" as a short hand, because I didn't want to address the several different ideas and laws that it covers individually, due to time constraints basically.

However, its absolutely correct that it is really a crude blanket term that lacks precision and deals with several different things that are thematically linked, but quite separate in reality. its not bad for someone to expand on a point I've made with those additional details. it adds to the discussion, I think.

This is getting meta and no longer directly responsive to the article, which I don't wholly disagree with. A tractor and a book are different situations.

Books are hard to copy, while files are easy to copy. Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them... even while they will pay the same for a fancy cup of coffee. Hence a scramble for some way to set up a toll booth that is hard to circumvent... DRM, streaming, proprietary reading platforms like Kindle, etc.

Stallman is absolutely right and was a visionary for seeing this when he did, but he doesn't get the full breadth of the problem. In his world, the creators of things starve. People can't have freedom because they want "free," which means slavery for the producers of content. (Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.) Stallman can ignore this side of the equation because he is a tenured academic. It doesn't matter to him that nobody pays for his work.

What we need is some kind of open digital rights tracking system that does not rely on hardware locks and that lets certain bits of information behave like physical objects with physical characteristics. It's a hard problem, but hard problems get solved. I used to think cryptocurrency was impractical in practice. Maybe something can be done with homomorphic encryption. Too bad nobody is working on this because everyone still thinks we can make everything "free" and (magic happens here) and the creators of things can somehow still eat.

Many people who try to make a living making music or writing are unable to do so, even if the music or the writing is pretty good, and that's due to obscurity, not piracy. Historically, even fewer people were able to.

Pages and even chapters of books have been copied by photocopiers (found in many libraries!) for decades. The only limit to the copying was how many quarters you had.

You need to give up the idea that people need to get paid for the stuff they get paid for today, that everyone who makes money doing something today, needs to make at least that much on the same thing in the future.

People will have to do whatever they can get paid for, which is the case for most people today anyway. Creators won't starve, they'll create less and have a real job.

You think the problem of "creators starving" is so bad it justifies anything and everything needed to prevent it. I don't.

"Create less and have a real job."

Wow.

I see lots of this kind of sentiment when I bring this up, but yours deserves credit for being exceptionally honest.

Historically creators didn't starve either, they worked on patronage assignments to pay the bills, and did whatever for the love of art once that was taken care of. Michaelangelo hated painting, but was commissioned for the Sistine chapel, one of the world's greatest works of art, because he was hungry.

I suppose we have fundamentally different utility functions. I think it is valuable to society to have a class of (relatively) well-off creators who do that as their full-time job. Some of these creators will even start off making mediocre works that don't contribute much, as they move from peripheral authentic participation towards the center (or drop out and get a "real job"). If you don't see that as a valuable terminal value, then we'll have to argue about that instead.

The obvious answer here that I'm shocked to not see, is basic income.

As automation and artificial intelligence become more prevalent, why would we use humans to fill 'real jobs'?

> they'll create less and have a real job

.. working for Google, Apple, Tivo, and every other company that bastardizes software into opaque services to extract profits via leasing.

I think imaginary property laws can't die a quick enough death. But I also sympathize with api's viewpoint about the inevitable effects on the economy and incentives for what gets created. You'd do well to internalize both ideas and see if you can't discover some synergy.

Or create more, or better quality...

> the creators of things starve

The creators of things can do whatever they want in Stallmans world. They just cannot use the state as a weapon against the sharing of information they created, or more appropriately, hold a state issued right to control. A tool to deny the propagation of knowledge in all its forms which destroys culture (how much media from the 20th century is lost forever again?) and cripples social progress.

Nothing about dissolving the false economy of existent information scarcity means anyone needs to stop producing it. Just because you cannot control everything about your information beyond simple goods exchange, that you cannot deny people access to it if someone else who has it wishes to provide it, and that you cannot stymie it for profit does not mean you still cannot create information as a profession, in all its forms. Most modern visual artists online today operate off a model without transfer based rent seeking (ie, commissioning, or for comic artists patreon or kickstarter models).

The creators of things can do whatever they want in Stallmans world.

That's not true at all. Stallman is against DRM in general, not state-backed DRM specifically.

I'm getting tired of explaining why this kind of reasoning is wrong. Specifically, your statement about how "In his world, the creators of things starve." No, for the thousandth time, it's not true at all.

There is nothing standing in the way of content creators selling GPL code, and even keeping it private until its been bought. Full stop. stop perpetuating this fallacious myth abouth FOSS, please.

That being said, the real issue still is about ownership. If I buy a block of wood, even if you already shaped it into your "art" i have every right to modify it as I see fit. Its a physical thing that I own. Now, I couldnt copy your work and sell it though.

In reality a tractor isnt that much different. Its a physical object, with software "which could be argued is also physical in the form of 1s and 0s", and if I buy it I have the right to modify it as I see fit. What if something goes wrong with the software and I want to fix it? Oh no, thats illegal?!

In reality this is about control of the user, and money, not about anything else. It reduces freedom and security and functionality in almost every way.

A good example of this is my bad purchase of a samsung smart tv. Even though I know its running linux and hence gplv2, samsung has made it almost impossible to root the device without bricking it. Why? because they want control over the user and lots of their money system is setup around that. Its not about protecting the user. Its not about warranty issues, because I would gladly click the "i accept that my device is no longer under warranty if I load debian on it instead of your crappy samsung os". Its about app store and ad money, and pitentially about surveillance.

> I'm getting tired of explaining why this kind of reasoning is wrong. Specifically, your statement about how "In his world, the creators of things starve." No, for the thousandth time, it's not true at all.

> There is nothing standing in the way of content creators selling GPL code, and even keeping it private until its been bought. Full stop.

You appear to be arguing that it is not expressly forbidden by the GPL, but this is not what api said. There is something standing in the way of content creators selling GPL code — practicality. When you can only sell one license to the software ever, it's really impractical to build a business around selling that software. In fact, I cannot think of any companies that create GPL-licensed software and actually make their money selling that GPL-licensed software.

>In his world, the creators of things starve.

How so? The entirety of human history has shown us that we create no matter what. Art, music, tools, stories, technology, etc. Creators have been making (and eating) for eons, well before modern IP laws. Look at the patron model, or commission based production, used for centuries. Or look at creation during leisure time for leisure (and its close modern cousin, large portions of the App Store).

The absence of strong, modern IP laws has never meant (and never will) "creators of things starve". It may mean varying levels of overall creation, but it gets hard to quantify what that would mean, especially when many components of our current strong IP laws work against and damage creation of IP.

>Stallman can ignore this side of the equation because he is a tenured academic.

You kind of lost me with this attack on him. This is just a lazy cop-out that gets you out of considering the counterargument on its points and merits. You're not debating his argument, you're attacking his character. Incidentally though, he is getting paid, and he is using the ancient patron model which is entirely consistent with his views.

"Look at the patron model, or commission based production, used for centuries."

Here's a better idea: look at the actual work produced under this model. With a few notable exceptions, it's an endless parade of flattering portraits of rich people, glorified depictions the wars they won, politically slanted historic fictions used to justify their authority, and scenes from the religious stories they used to instill terror and obedience in the people they dominated ruthlessly.

In other words, if you actually understood what you were talking about, you'd know that art produced under the model you describe existed - above all - to project and protect the power of the people who paid for it. The beauty of the copyright systems is that it provided the first real break from a brutal and largely impoverished world in which a tiny handful of rich, powerful individuals (and the institutions they controlled) maintained exclusive control over what did and didn't get made.

Seriously, what else have you got? A compelling case for a return to the divine right of kings? Maybe you could defend the Church's Index of Banned Books while you're at it? Or remind us why burning witches was maybe a good thing after all?

Protip, dude: don't use history to support your arguments if you don't know the first thing about the history you're citing. The system defined by contemporary IP law is far from perfect, but the idea that it's worse that what it replaced is completely insane. Further progress means adapting IP law to the realities of the 21st Century, not saying "Screw it, let's just revert to what worked for the ruling class in 16th."

It is absurd to compare university professorship - which revolves around concept of academic freedom and is backed up by the tenure system - with the arbitrary whims of patronage as it existed under, say, the Medici.

Indeed, the whole point of tenure is to create working conditions that avoid the exceedingly well-known problems endemic to the patronage system.

> Books are hard to copy

Err, no, it only takes half an hour at most and a Xerox machine. It's much cheaper than buying it too. We used to do it all the time when I was in college, which helped a lot given that sometimes we needed books that were out of print.

And btw, the best thing about a printed book is that it's forever yours and you can rent it, burn it or copy it with no technical restrictions ;-)

> Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them

Welcome to the world of capitalism; supply and demand is a bitch, isn't it?

My problem with such an argument is that it tries to take a moral stand, whereas there's no morality in it, because being paid for shit is not a fundamental right. Plus in a world in which copyright terms keep getting extended such that Disney will never lose their rights for Mickey Mouse, some people find it hard to give a shit about copyrights.

But the freaking elephant in the room is that DRM does not protect the interests of "creators" and it does not stop people from pirating content. DRM only achieves two things - (1) lock-in for the company owning the platform (e.g. Amazon) and (2) milking loyal customers.

As an example, I'm resetting my phone like once every two months or so and reinstalling everything ... the Kindle app is now telling me that my books were downloaded on too many devices and so I can't download them. I can't "unregister" devices either, because this is simply a software bug. I then searched those books on torrent sites, found them, downloaded them and I'll never buy books from Amazon again.

There is little wrong with DRM as a concept, "But" just because you call something DRM does not mean it should be able to do anything.

IMO, a DRM bill of rights needs to exist to qualify for government protection. Data needs to be transferable FOR FREE to a new user. You can't shut down your DRM servers without first removing the DRM. You can't remotely change anything on a user’s system. Source code must be freely available for security researchers. DRM can only protect information not the operation of a physical device.

That's a good idea, but I don't see it happening. Perverse incentives abound on every side. Everyone wants this tilted their way.

We had a very good system in the age of printed and recorded media. Not perfect, but good. We just have to figure out how to update it, or figure out a new one. Part of my point was that this hasn't happened yet, and I'm sad that few seem to be thinking about this from all sides snd really working on it.

> DRM can only protect information not the operation of a physical device.

So I think it would actually be reasonable for the DRM to protect a physical device; but the contract should be structured as such.

If I have title to my car and can dispose of it as I see fit; I shouldn't have to abide by DRM. If it is rented and doesn't actually belong to me, then I could see technological mechanisms such as limiting mileage or range as a valid way to enforce part of the contract.

What the line of appropriate vs. not appropriate is of course not necessarily black and white; but I do think John Deere is in the wrong here and the farmer is in the right.

There is little wrong with DRM except everything about DRM. None of the exceptions you've called for would even be an issue without DRM.

Stallman is not a tenured academic. He's the president of a non-profit (the FSF). He makes his living from people's voluntary donations and (I presume) speaking fees.

He does not get paid by the FSF, nor does he accept speaking fees (insofar as I am aware; I'm not sure if there are certain sponsors, but he insists that those be donated to the FSF, not himself); his time is donated. He received a MacArthur grant a while back, while he is able to live off of.

Doesn't he have an office at MIT in the Gates building?

In any case, it doesn't impact what I said. His gig is nice if you can get it, but I don't think the FSF can afford to pay everyone who works on GNU code.

>(Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.)

I could go and lick the grass on my porch. I won't get paid for that. No matter how much I would like it.

Many things are just not profitable.

Unless you find other models, like patronizing

>Unless you find other models, like patronizing

Patronizing like - https://www.patreon.com/ - or patronizing like, "offensively condescending" [1]. Based on context, I'm assuming the former, but patronizing is a auto-antonym, so it should be clarified [2].

[1] https://www.wordnik.com/words/patronizing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

If an activity (particularly one like writing books) creates value for people and yet somehow people engaged in that activity can't get paid, that might deserve a closer look than "many things are just not profitable." Or a better comparison than to a hypothetical personally recreative activity like licking grass.

> In his world, the creators of things starve.

Why can't John Deere make money selling tractors? The company was founded in 1837. Hasn't running a business for 178 years demonstrated that it is possible to eat and produce? Or is your comment unrelated to the article?

It seems pretty clear to me from context that api was talking about Richard Stallman's views on copyright law, not John Deere's tractors.

The software in the farm equipment is useless without the farm equipment. Sure, the "file" may be easy to copy, but building the rest of the tractor to USE the file? Slightly more difficult. And, referring to the article, why would you use a tractor to copy music?

I do think that the cheapest way to get a tractor that would use the software would be to pay Deere for another tractor.

In the doom scenario you sketch nobody would produce creative content anymore, and what exactly would be the problem with that then? Apparently people don't think it's worth enough. This is how a free market works.

I also disagree with your statement that people only want creative content for free. I think Spotify and Netflix prove that people simply want the most convenient service, but old-fashioned companies keep making roadblocks that make legal content less convenient to use than pirated/illegal content.

> Stallman [...] is a tenured academic. It doesn't matter to him that nobody pays for his work.

The university does? I assume he can get fired if he doesn't do his job even if he has tenure.

> Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.

I think a lot of volunteers, e.g. a large amount of programmers who contribute to open source projects, do not think of themselves as or could be qualified as slaves.

Regarding the cup of coffee, they've put DRM on that too: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/how-do-you-drm-a-...

We absolutely do not need a digital rights tracking system to turn bits into de facto physical objects. The point being, if we needed it, it would be invented and widely adopted. Practically no consumer wants that system, or anything remotely close to it.

There is no magic in making everything digital free - its just the way the universe works. Those things which can be trivially produced (digital copies) are tantamount to an infinite supply. In the case of limitless supply, prices will approach zero. Eventually the law will catch up with the rest of society.

Creatives will make money in other ways; there will always be writers, artists, poets, and hackers. People are compelled to create and share. They will not always be paid per unit of work after the fact.

Creators can't have it both ways. The info you sell has to be useful to the people buying it...or they won't buy it. Just because we now have a technically literate population doesn't mean that you can change the rules to make selling new shit still applicable.

Information is free if you sell it (in a book...in a prog...written on a stone tablet) you are letting others use it. Farmers are an easier target for them cause mostly they font own their land, or seed, now it would seem even their tractors. I think they have been hanging out too close to Monsanto and others whom make our litigious society possible while logically incongruent.

And if everyone is a creator then why how can everyone starve? It will only starve the ones who create poorly.

In the existing world, creators starve all the time--consider the concept of the "starving artist".

There is this meme that somehow not having copyright immediately implies no possible monetization strategy, and it needs to die.

There are other monetization strategies. A popular one is to offer something for free and then use it to conduct mass surveillance and sell your customers to advertisers and governments.

When will it stop?

Once most of the population realises the situation we've gotten ourselves into, perhaps things might change for the better. However, it's looking more and more like we're increasingly willing to sacrifice individual ownership rights and freedom for convenience or other things like security...

The closest we've gotten to a sort of "copyright revolution" might've been in the last decade when file sharing grew explosively and many people started thinking about the issue, but then the efforts of governments and corporations seem to have effectively suppressed that by leading consumers into using more convenient but less free systems.

> As soon as books become computer files...When will it stop?

IANAL, but legally, this has nothing to do with software. You can force buyers to agree to a license agreement to legally read your book. The right to first sale applies to copyright and trademark - it does not allow you to ignore license agreements. Obviously it's easier to enforce on software because you can execute DRM code on a device.

Blaming this on software or computers misses the underlying mechanism and focuses on the wrong thing. It is, and always has been, an issue of what we allow and don't allow in our legal system.

It will stop when people want it to stop.

What happens when we have computers implanted in our brains? Do I no longer own my brain?

"Metabolic control. Enhanced sensory perception. Improved reflexes and muscle capacity. Vastly increased data processing speed and capacity.

All improvements thanks to our cyber-brains and cyborg bodies. So what if we can't live without high-level maintenance? We have nothing to complain about. It doesn't mean we've sold our souls to Section 9.

We do have the right to resign if we choose. Provided we give the government back our cyborg shells and the memories they hold. "

- Ghost In The Shell (1995) Script

Such a great movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/

What happened to australopithicus? You'll be free to starve with a meat-based brain as everyone with implants outcompetes you at everything if you'd prefer.

I think the brain reading writing argument is a really good example that should be used in discussion of this topic more often and more in depth. It shows even a layman how this issues can have a real ompact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elQC62FUgqw

Yeah, I remember back before ebooks, we could all just Xerox the books we owned, bind them together, and sell or give away the copies to anyone we wanted to, and they could do the same. It was a lot more work than just copying a file, but everyone was perfectly fine with people doing it.

Oh wait a minute, that's not at all what it was like. It's very easy to latch onto people like RMS who make everything seem so black and white, especially when they're older than you and can remember the "good old days" when everything was more civilized. These are all critical, important, vital issues that people should not let go of for one second and never stop thinking about. It's just unfortunate when people like RMS want to turn it into some grand good vs. evil narrative (frequently in which they see themselves in the hero/prophet role). It frames everyone with a differing or more nuanced opinion as someone who is not operating in good faith, which is just never good for anyone.

I don't think there's a person alive today who has all the answers about this stuff. There may not even be a correct or true or proper answer given the ways in which we've framed the debate, only a pseudoinverse solution that makes everyone the least unhappy on the whole. But we're long past letting any one person with their very, very, very specific ideology define that debate. I worry like hell about all this stuff, but the people going around saying "See?!? RMS was right!!!" might be counterproductive. It twists the debate back into "you're either with RMS or you're against him", and whatever his other good qualities may be, that's a tough pill to swallow for just about everyone. He approaches everything in the most fundamentalist way possible, which I've come to see as a sign of intellectual conceit rather than conviction.

people like RMS who make everything seem so black and white

aka: Ultimatist.

Just like the EFF, ACLU, NRA, NARAL, etc.

The job of the ultimatist is to expand the Overton Window, challenge assumptions, highlight hypocrisy, ask uncomfortable questions.

Agree or disagree, our public discourse would be less healthy without ultimatists like RMS.

I just realized that I'm basically saying that RMS himself does not function in good faith, and I think that's the root of my distrust of him. He's the kind of person who likes to assemble elaborate ideologies over time. He doesn't seem like the kind of person who is instinctively skeptical about his own perceptions. I really don't get the sense that he ever plays devil's advocate with himself or actively tries to come up with the best arguments against his own beliefs in order to strengthen them.

If he had ever written anything in which he talked about how his views have evolved or changed over the course of his life, that would be one thing. But I don't think he's changed his mind about anything over the past 30 years, outside of becoming even more fundamentalist. I don't trust people who never change their minds about anything, especially those who think changing their mind is a sign of weakness. If they are widely known for declaring those who disagree with them as being evil or otherwise morally and ethically questionable, I not only don't trust them but start to think of them as toxic distractions to the real debates that we all should be having.

RMS strikes me as the kind of guy who is constantly arguing against himself, and playing the devil's advocate. In many speeches[1], he is not just setting up strawmen to fight his position, but is actively adopting other mindsets he does not agree with in order to explain concepts to an audience.

But he's very good at stating his own (biased) opinion.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNBMdDaYhZA

To me, this is particularly concerning in the case where the physical equipment outlasts the software support cycle. We (society) haven't worried about this so much with computers because the $/compute-power has declined so precipitously over the years.

But it seems more important than ever that we have a way for individual users of software-controlled devices to move their "business logic" between standardized service vendors, whether that service is compute cycles in the cloud, or the physical work provided by a tractor.

Also, if the equipment is ultimately being rented, and the user owns the configuration, then the farmer could just rent another tractor (maybe from a competing tractor rental vendor), load his configuration on it, and keep the farm running.

Of course this is far from Stallman's vision of the everyman owning/modifying the code down to the bare metal, but it at least tries to shift the balance of control back toward the user.

I'm waiting for the first class action suit against said manufacturer for selling products which don't meet expected standards of fit for usage. It seems to me that locking up products in this way artificially limits their usage lifetime and fitness for use which seems to run afoul of an implied contract that they are selling a product. If that product cannot be used past X years, and the consumer is locked out of changing/adapting said product, they should be given a refund when it's no longer fit for use.

Thanks for doing my homework for me. do I need to pay you royalties if I use this argument in a class proceeding?

Some of us just don't buy DRM books and make copies for personal archival purposes.

> As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights... When will it stop?

I don't want it to stop - I think it's a good thing. By making a book impossible to pass from one person to another, the publisher is able to extract an income that is closer to the total benefit people derive from reading the book. In short: authors make more money. And so more books will be written, and readers will have a wider choice of better quality books.

And it's not just that digital books kill the secondary market for books - they also allow publishers to be highly discriminatory. If you are a woman in your 20s you pay full price for the new Taylor Swift biography, but a man in his 50s is offered a generous discount. For the latest Glenn Beck polemic the pricing structure is reversed.

So not only do publishers get a larger slice of the book-value pie, they are also able to grow the size of the pie. Magic!

publisher is able to extract an income that is closer to the total benefit people derive from reading the book. In short: authors make more money

These two statements are not logically connected. Price is controlled by supply and demand. If publishers are able to make more money from scarcity of books, it does not follow that authors are able to get more money unless there is also a scarcity of authors and a surplus of publishers.

It also assumes there's anything like a marketplace. Not, for example, one corporation pretty much owning the entire ebook market segment.

Yes, price is controlled by supply and demand - and I'm describing an increase in demand. And just like any other competitive marketplace the price will rise when demand rises.

When Glenn Beck writes his next book he will shop it to the publisher who pays him the most money - competition between publishers means the amount he receives will be proportional to the revenue the publisher can generate.

Exactly correct. The thing is, I do like digital media but I am starting to prefer buying eBooks directly from publishers when they provide DRM free versions for Kindle, Apple, and PDF.

Every once in a while, I will gather the recent Kindle books I have purchased and attempt to convert them to PDF. This seems to work for most of them. IANAL, but my understanding is that if I have purchased a Kindle book then I can legally back it up as a PDF. Similarly, sometimes when I purchase a movie on DVD, I sometimes like a ripped copy on my laptop, especially for Qi Gong and Yoga lessons.

The difference between a prophet and a fool is whether they are right.

It's not only about tractors. Cars and other equipment are based more and more on computers too. I saw 60+ year old tractors and cars, all work fine.

For expensive physical products, I would rather choose one with a high quality and a long lifespan with no computer in it at all. There are only a few left like Mercedes-Benz G-Class, Land Rover Defender, Hummer H1, Jeep Wrangler, Caterham 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_G-Class , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummer_H1 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_Wrangler , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterham_7 .

Watching the Top Gear Specials where they drive with old cars through foreign countries on crappy roads - I always think about how would a modern car survive that - it wouldn't. For example the Porsche 924 (1980s) was cars with a lots of computer chips, it was completely dead (the dashboard lighted like a Christmas tree, the windscreen wipers was the only thing working) after a few days driving through Africa.

Richard Stallman was right. The GNU (L)GPL 2+ is a very good choice for open source projects - at least for bigger (for smaller BSD/MIT is good too).

Unfortunately, many people, including me, are called alarmist; until what they say or a variation thereof comes to fruition. And then its just too late. As you imply, a damning precedent has already been set that you do not own books and we have even already seen examples of those books simply being erased form people's libraries. But in this new world, where the sheer confusion about what digital anything is, evil forces are taking any and all advantages from that confusion to undermine and usurp civil democracy and society.

An earlier article did a much better job layout why this is a huge problem for independent farmers:

"The family farmer who owns this tractor is a friend of mine. He just wanted a better way to fix a minor hydraulic sensor. Every time the sensor blew, the onboard computer would shut the tractor down. It takes a technician at least two days to order the part, get out to the farm, and swap out the sensor. So for two days, Dave’s tractor lies fallow. And so do his fields.

Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave’s sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor’s highly proprietary computer system—the tractor’s engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast."

Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/new-high-tech-farm-equipment-ni...

So basically, the concerns are very reasonable - operations cannot rely on systems that are put out of commission without a way to fix relatively minor issues on the spot.

While the system is trying to protect the farmer for liability purposes, if that farmer overrides the safe guard, liability shifts. The choice should be with the farmer and not John Deere lawyers.

Why doesn't the market handle this?

If John Deere is only willing to sell lifetime licenses to operate their vehicles, thus putting the farmer at risk in ways like you described, why do farmers still buy these "licenses"?

Naively, they must represent some advantage (despite their shortcomings), otherwise John Deere wouldn't be able to sell these things.

John Deere was the Apple of tractors, 20 years before Apple was Apple. It's killed off all the competition [1] for their tractors' ability to "just work" - even at a premium. Deere coupled high quality hardware with high quality service, whereas most other tractors tried to compete on cost by dropping one. Apple vs HP; Deere vs Case. It served them well in the long run, if made things dicy early on. There is no competition any more. And the development lead and capital required to compete with their machines, and their repair/distribution network is immense.

[1] http://www.tennesseetractor.com/assets/Uploads/jd-timeline.j...

Put slightly more technically: there are natural barriers of entry to the marketplace that make it tough for a disruptor to displace a incumbent monopolist (or in this case oligopolist... Deere basically splits the market with a few other competitors, all of whom collude on this issue).

Would this be considered cartel behavior?

If John Deere is the Apple of tractors, then Open Ecology is the Linux of tractors.

- http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski

- http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac

One hopes that if farmers really care about this, then JD's competition (http://seekingalpha.com/article/2523975-john-deere-versus-th...), will dive in and start providing an alternative, at a profit.

We'll see if farmers really care about this though, or whether it turns out to be something like "Replaceable Batteries" or "SD Flash slots" on smart phones.

John Deere is better than crappy old "American" brands like Case IH, but it is in the process of being disrupted from below by imports like Kubota. And from above by Cat. The picture might not be as rosy a decade from now.

It sort of is.

The Wired article mentions that some farmers are preferring to buy old tractors without the electronics. This demand increases the value for the used market and should depress the value of new tractors. There will likely be a growth in the business of maintaining old tractors and, potentially, enough public awareness of the benefits of tractors without electronics that another manufacturer can step in.

Or it might fizzle. Markets don't solve every problem, but they usually solve the problems people are willing to pay for.

Maybe tractor hacking will become a thing, too. I know lots of guys who circumvent the computers in their cars with pirated software, to make them racier. Might be a career in it for some of them.

I've recently become interested in this, since I bought a 2015 vehicle with a computer in the console. Do you have any advice/resources for a budding car hacker?

Recreational farmers probably do/will. However, its more problematic for farms functioning as a business.

As and aside, farmers aren't the only ones interested in old farm equipment. There's a vibrant community of collectors. Both communities tune and refurb the equipment to working order, tho' the collectors go further for appearance. So there are two groups vying for old equipment, driving prices even further.

Lock in and capital expense - the market is terrible at providing what is currently a financial service coupled with large equipment delivery. You need both halves - the sheet bending/engine manufacturing and the cash on offer to float the loan to the farmer.

There's a lot of strength to being incumbent in both of these areas.

Why can't a manufacturer partner up with a financial company to provide the bundle?

They can and do at the low end, but the upper end market is dominated by Deere and a few others in a way that is hard to understand.

The manufacturer has to have the deep pockets and stomach for a protracted battle - lots of folks "bleed green" and will only buy Deere. Deere is everywhere in the countryside - big marketing campaigns.

Deere and others also have large dealer networks. That is where the sales are made. Many of these dealers have been around for a really long time and have all of the customer access. You'd have to break into the network somehow.

You'd have to not only be able to make it, but have the cash on hand to sustain more than a few years of incredibly low sales and lack of distribution.

It seems there is more backstory here that is missing from the article. Maybe a better question is, why don't all the auto companies, which already cooperate and "collude" on a lot of things, have similar licenses? There are little niche markets for modifying the software in cars, they even make movies about it. If there is some sort of financial protection to the manufacturer, I'd think they'd do similar things for certain cars, perhaps the ones that don't have performance enthusiasts, like minivans or something. I can think of some very real reasons where a company like Ford or Toyota would like to make sure you only use "sanctioned parts" for repairs and DRM could help them to verify that other parts aren't usable; they don't seem to be doing that though.

I'm just guessing here, but I know Deere produces some fairly sophisticated software that takes over head photos of crops and they have various services that offer advice on how to best farm different parts of a farmer's land. Some of that software interacts with their farm equipment (like it can signal the onboard software to maybe work more slowly in particularly dense parts of a crop and stuff like that.) I could see them trying to somehow protect that software investment and treat it as a lock-in where the device owners may want to use that service with other brands of equipment or something. From what I gather, it's a non-trivial amount of software that they've built that has some significant value.

> Maybe a better question is, why don't all the auto companies, which already cooperate and "collude" on a lot of things, have similar licenses?

They do. The difference is that farmers are far more likely to attempt a fix on their machine than the average car user. Also, since farmers use their tractors more than the average user uses their car, a tractor is part of a system, while a car typically is the system. As such, there are a lot of parts to integrate with and as a result, more places where the system can break.

> Why doesn't the market handle this?

> If John Deere is only willing to sell lifetime licenses to operate their vehicles, thus putting the farmer at risk in ways like you described, why do farmers still buy these "licenses"?

Because John Deere has a monopoly.

> Naively, they must represent some advantage (despite their shortcomings), otherwise John Deere wouldn't be able to sell these things.

Yes, that is naive. If you look to capitalism to solve the problems of people at the bottom, you'll almost always be disappointed.

That still leaves all the people who currently own licenses to tractors instead of tractors with poor prospects. Suddenly they are forced with the decision of putting up with John Deere's BS or investing in a whole new tractor. And that is if this wonderful market solution were to spring up tomorrow.

That goes without saying that this issue is bigger than the tractor market. Car manufacturers are hopping on board and there are even fewer options for cars without protected computers in them. This issue is only getting more pressing as more daily objects become integrated with computer systems.

It most likely will, but it takes time. Product cycles for ag equipment are similar to the auto industry - new models every year, but major model overhauls every 4-5 years. That means it'll really take 10-15 years before the market really adapts to the demands of the customer. This technology is only a few years old.

Are there regulatory barriers for entering the market for producing farm tractors? That's the first question I would ask, if I were wondering why doesn't the market handle this.

The benefits are not relevant to small farmers, who do not have enough economic power to really matter.

The market handles this just fine, and shows us that in practice, this is not the problem armchair-lawyer nerds are making it out to be.

The whole OP is disingenuous - the issue is not who 'owns' the tractor. The issue is with the licence of the software that runs it. That doesn't change anything about the ownership of the tractor. Shoddy reporting, designed to appeal to the prejudices of their audience.

The entire point is that this dichotomy seriously blurs the lines of "ownership" in new and potentially harmful ways.

People have been doing this years with lawn mowers, both push and riding, for as long as I can remember. The complexity of work require to skirt the system increases but the reasons never really change.

If the system is so unreliable there are many other farm tractor manufacturers who can step in and likely are already exploiting the issues John Deere has.

If anything, perhaps lemon laws could be applied to farm machinery and written to be as X number of days across a calendar year. the nice thing about farming today is your likely to have online resources, places where word of this problem can travel fast enough to make a manufacture take notice

grew up urban, married a farmer... learned everything I know (not much) about fixing things with spit tape and wire from them.

what you say makes sense, but meanwhile Dave is still standing in his field with a useless machine and lots of work to do.

This is exactly the point. If your car is a lemon and always in the shop, at least it's trivial to get a rental, even if you're out of pocket the cash. Any number of car rental companies will drive a car out to your house or the shop where it is.

If your tractor is broken down and you need to bale that hay that's been drying in the fields today before the rain comes tomorrow and ruins it, you're screwed unless you can find a nearby farmer to help.

Hopefully the terms of your neighbor's tractor lease don't come with a geofence!

In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.

I don't have any sympathy for what John Deere is trying to to in using the DMCA to restrict how people repair their own tractors.

But the legal issues need to be better delineated than this article attempts to do.

1. John Deere does not "own" your tractor when you buy it from them and it is not asserting that it does. Software is automatically protected by copyright. It is a tangible form of expression of something that is creative and, the way copyright law works, a developer of software does not need to do anything except his normal work in order to gain copyright protection. You code it, you own it. That is the default. If you code it while being paid by someone else as his employee hired to invent, then that someone else owns it. Or if you code it as a work for hire paid by someone else, again, that someone else owns it. The situations vary. But, almost universally, for commercial, proprietary software, the customer almost never owns the software he uses when buying and operating a piece of hardware operated by that software. We all take this for granted when we buy a computer or mobile device. We own the hardware but not the software. We license the software and that is it. That license gives us a right to use the software for its intended purposes but it is almost invariably accompanied by terms that restrict us as consumers from reverse engineering the code or otherwise using the code for any purpose beyond the limited scope of what the license itself allows. For example, we cannot reverse engineer the software to attempt to create a competitive form of software product. People may have philosophical objections to this - usually falling under the "all information ought to be free" rubric - but, unless and until that philosophy prevails and works to change the law, that is by no means what the law is today. Today, when you have commercial software, you have copyright protection and hence a lack of ability to use or do anything else with that software without the permission of the copyright holder. And that means a license.

2. What John Deere is doing with its tractors is not claiming ownership of them once you buy them. Just as when you buy a Mac, Apple is telling you, you own the hardware and you have a license to use the software during the life of the product, so too John Deere is saying the same thing with its tractors. You own the tractor and you can do what you want with it until the product dies but, in once it dies, you have no further license to use the software on anything else besides that product. That is the legal effect of what a license does. There is nothing whatever controversial about this unless you have a philosophical resistance to the very idea of copyright (I realize many people do, of course). Under the law, however, John Deere is claiming nothing more here than what every computer manufacturer has claimed since the beginning of modern computing. To say, as this article does, that John Deere is claiming to own your tractor is wrong. Since the author is hardly ignorant of this, it seems the above statement is inserted for emotional effect and not as part of any reasoned argument.

3. All that said, copyright law is not absolute and never has been. When one gets a copyright, it is time-limited (or at least should be, notwithstanding the absurdly long extensions granted in recent years under the Bono Act, etc.). It also is not absolute even while the rights exist. The huge category limiting its effect is that of fair use. In some cases, public policy requires that certain uses of otherwise copyrighted materials be permitted regardless of what a copyright holder might claim. Classic cases include digital video recording, select permissible copying from books, etc. In the case of the John Deere software, and that of every other vehicle manufacturer that seeks to monopolize the market for repair of its vehicles through use of the DMCA's non-circumvention rules, the issue is not whether its software ought to be subject to copyright protection but rather whether they can use that protection to prevent people from conducting basic repairs on the vehicles they own. And that is a public policy question.

4. So, what is the proper public policy: should the DMCA be allowed to be used as a legal sledgehammer by which manufacturers can bludgeon owners and thereby force them to do their repairs in ways that lock them forever in to the manufacturer? It would certainly seem not. Indeed, when framed in this way, the manufacturers' position becomes extreme and even outrageous. Well, EFF, et al. are doing a good job of arguing this in the relevant places to try to shape the law fairly on this point. They are to be commended for this and, in this sense, what John Deere is arguing is pretty despicable.

5. But none of this means that they own your tractor after you buy it. Nor does it mean that copyright doesn't apply to the software they develop. It can and it does. It is just that copyright has limits and, when pushed beyond those limits, loses its salutary purpose and becomes obnoxious and damaging.

6. As a final point, nothing in John Deere's position challenges the idea of "ownership" as we know it. By framing the issue in this way, this article (in my view) tries to play on common sympathies but does so in a very misleading way. I believe this only weakens what is otherwise a sound position on preventing misuse of the DMCA. It also misstates the law pretty badly. So here are my two cents trying to correct this.

Your logic is sound. Point 4 is the real argument about what the actual intent of these companies is; The fact that these companies are using the DMCA as a thinly veiled attempt to limit consumer choice and destroy competitive secondary markets. Both of which are repeatedly upheld when legislation or courts take action. Hence the the banning of "Tie in Sales" provisions in warranties on goods.

>Generally, tie-in sales provisions are not allowed. Such a provision would require a purchaser of the warranted product to buy an item or service from a particular company to use with the warranted product in order to be eligible to receive a remedy under the warranty. The following are examples of prohibited tie-in sales provisions.[1]

Regardless of how the DMCA arguments play out, at least the automakers will have difficulties moving forward as there is a long fought battle over not releasing service information on in-car computer and diagnostic information to third-party repair service provides. There hasn't been legislation over the issue because automakers volunteered to release information on service and tools required to service in car computer systems.[2] It would most likely be easy to build a legal case against an auto company that required you to take your warrantied car to a franchised dealership for warrantied replacement of a defective circuit board. So in a not too hard to imagine hypothetical scenario where a bug in the car's cam timing software cause mechanical failure, but the auto manufacturer refuses to sell the replacement part (replacement software) or tools required to perform service to third-party service providers because of software licensing, would that not fall under Magnuson-Moss Act if the repair would be warrantied?

[1]https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/bus...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Vehicle_Owners'_Right_to_...

[edit] spelling/format

The people who have the money to buy the mega-tractors you see in the article don't care. That's why, unless someone outside the industry makes a stink, nothing will happen.

These are giga-corporations who are 'family owned' in name only. If they don't rent, they operate that machine for a few years, play the tax game, and trade it even-money for a new one. To them, ownership doesn't matter. Their service contracts with implement dealers let them not worry about who owns what. All they care about is whether or not it works.

(Off topic now) Between this and the stupidly high price for land, it's small farmers who are getting left in the dust. I say this in every thread related to farming; I am in my early 30's and I guarantee I live to see the death of the actual family farm.

Disagree. The family owned farmers care too. For the big equipment, like combines, there's a handful of people everyone pays to have their fields harvested. This person get's compensation in the form of money and other services (someone else will plow their field for instance).

People own their own tractors and share time to get things done, otherwise you'd have to own all of the equipment (which is only justified when you've got a giant factory farm). More of the small farms own new tractors, as the 70s era tractors have been overhauled to the point of junk.

This is the current status of small town Iowa at least.

Iowan here. There are almost no family farms left at all. My neighbor would desperately like to be a farmer. But the scrubby 40-acre field across from his house just sold for $400,000. He'd get maybe 120 bushels of corn off of it. Current price per bushel: $3.80. So $456 income per acre == $18,240 per year. That's half the mortgate payments. Not to mention the cost of working the field. So a lost cause.

The 13 farmers that lived and worked on my road when I was a kid are ALL gone. City folks rent those houses; corporations farm those fields.

One wonders how the corporations farm them. The situation you describe doesn't sound like it would be any more economically feasible for them to work than your neighbor.

(Hm. Random calculation: 120 bushels of corn at 56 lbs per bushel, per acre, is about 11 metric tons per hectare[1]. According to the FDA[2], the US average projected production for 2014/2015 is 10.7 metric tons (the world average is about half that), so your field is pretty decent.)

[1] Thank you, units! You have: (181 * 56) pounds per acre You want: metrictons per hectare * 11.360947 / 0.088020829

[2] http://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/production.pdf

The corporate farms can do it courtesy of massive scale leverage and typically inexpensive borrowing costs.

The average person might pay 4.5% to 7% for that $400,000 property. A sizable corporation can borrow for 20 years at half those rates.

Better yet, the big corporation has cash reserves and cash flow from their big existing operation, and can buy the property outright. That property then yields, say, 5% per year on the cash invested - which obliterates what all corporations are getting on cash or cash equivalents.

The corporate farm can redirect 100% of that property's production toward paying for the property and farming costs, without harming itself in the process. If done correctly this becomes a perpetually expanding machine, the same premise that has led to consolidation in other previously highly fractured industries. Warren Buffett (among others) is presently attempting to do this in auto dealerships for example.

It's the same reason Costco can operate quite successfully on a 2.x% operating profit margin, whereas most businesses will tip over rapidly with that slim of a buffer.

The small farmer will constantly struggle to not drown by comparison.

40 acres is probably about the absolute minimum worthwhile size to farm corn and it would be handled by a tractor much smaller than the one shown in the article. And that's probably if you inherited the land for free. A "normal" farm will have hundreds or thousands of acres of corn, so the cost of equipment is amortized across a much larger crop volume.

>One wonders how the corporations farm them. The situation you describe doesn't sound like it would be any more economically feasible for them to work than your neighbor.

They don't have to pay for a house per 40 acres.

Mega corporations have economies of scale on their side for production costs, and likely much better interest rates on the land. So they can farm the land for cheaper, and the cost of the land on a per-annus basis is cheaper too.

181? Where did that come from, idiot?

120 bushels per acre is about 7.5 tons per hectare, which probably makes it a bit low for economic farming.

     You have: (120 * 56) pounds per acre
     You want: metrictons per hectare
	     * 7.5321198
	     / 0.13276475

There is only one farm on my road that doesn't have the next generation poised to take or already has been taken over by the operation, and even in that case I believe there is interest from the grandchildren. From my anecdotal experience, the future of family farms looks fairly bright.

"Iowan here. There are almost no family farms left at all."

We still have family farms in North Dakota, so I guess it might be a regional thing. Also, for those counting incorporations (like a couple of newspapers), you have to be stupid not to incorporate.

Sure, every farmer left is incorporated. My Dad led that movement in the 60's. I count a family farm as one that a family lives on, owns and works.

That may be true in Iowa, but in Utah, there are still quite a few family farms. Even if we are a shrinking minority, it still seems worthwhile to fight to own our own small pieces of equipment.

Which town? I'd imagine this is pretty common in places near Des Moines/Cedar Rapids suburb type towns. My observations come from living in Blakesburg, IA -- town of 400 people.

Southern Johnson County, south of Iowa City. Nothing suburban about it.

Small world Joe, I'm a Hawkeye. Go Hawks!

Is this land that is being bought for future subdivisions? Definitely have seen this in areas by suburban areas. Certainly not all farming is being done at a loss?

Farming is a lot like a startup, except maybe drawn out over more years than tech people like to see.

You invest everything you have into a business that will return you very little, at least in the start. As you start to grow you put your profits into growth. Finally, as you reach retirement age the debts are hopefully paid off and you are actually making money for the first time. You're also sitting on millions of dollars worth of assets that are now fully in your name. When you are ready to retire, you sell it all.

In other words: You live in poverty over your working career so that you can cash out later in life, while hopefully not going bust in the meantime. The profitability of the business is dependant on the market and the weather, but even more dependant on what stage your business is at. Early stage businesses are apt to lose money most years, but late stage businesses should make money most years.

> Certainly not all farming is being done at a loss?

A big corp can calculate differently from your small farmers. It's OK to them if the field turns profitable finally in 20 or 30 years because they have enough other sources of income to pay for the mortgage (or buy the field out of pocket).

The small farmer on the other hand would be bankrupt by then.

No, no development anywhere around. I'm not sure why the price went up. I bought my land in the 90's and it was ~$1000/acre. Now its 10X that. Probably a bubble.

Why do they want to be a corn farmer? (Just curious. I don't know anything about the business of outdoor farming in Iowa.)

It seems like you could make the mortgage if you can grow specialty crops - http://www.profitableplantsdigest.com/10-most-profitable-spe...

Also, indoor growing is said to make certain crops grow 5x faster with 5x less resources. Here's one company that seems to be growing (they're opening a large facility in my state) - http://aerofarms.com/

Specialty crops depend on the availability of somebody to buy them. My brother tried that last, before he gave up.

Aeroponics sounds interesting, but the fact is we have almost a billion acres of farmland. Maybe some distant day we'll convert that to 200 million acres of aeroponics facilities, but that seems unlikely.

I agree with you, both local farmers I talk to and family are speaking of the new generation being brought up farming. There's still a lot of family involvement in the industry and those young farmers taking over the family land are extremely interested in relevant and modern technology. They'll be a huge driving force in the coming years.

And farmers still talk. If Farmer Brown and Farmer Ted are sittin' down at the local terminal having their coffee they talk about their equipment. Word of mouth still matters huge in the areas I work in.

I know they care, too. But, they lack the political pull, money and time to address these issues.

Small town Illinois is similar to Iowa apparently, except for the last section. We do share labor, and rent/trade labor for the use of large machinery. But, the market for older machinery is still very strong. I bought 2 1970's masseys at auction last year, and one small mid-90's JD this year. The bids were competitive, but the price was fair.

It is still a thing for people to take their combines down south and work their way back to the north. My Dad and some of my coworkers did that in summer as youths. Pay is pretty good for someone with no degree and you don't get anytime to spend the money. Nicer now than back in the day since the cabs have all sorts of extras like satellite radio, air conditioning, and GPS.

"All they care about is whether or not it works."

Which is why they care more about this issue than someone without a mega-tractor. These vehicles need to be operational when they're called upon, every minute of downtime costs a substantial amount of money that adds up incredibly fast. Sure, they have service contracts but waiting on a technician and waiting even longer for a replacement part is out of the question. A broken sensor will disable a tractor even if it would run perfectly fine without it. Mega farms care about losing the ability to improvise repairs in the field and/or take the risk of long term damage if its outweighed by the cost of the short term downtime.

I've experienced the results of an ECU that can disable a perfectly functional vehicle. I had a ride day with one of our service technicians in our Class 7 truck. The "Check Engine" light had been coming on intermittently throughout the day but we ignored it as it came on inconsistently and we were already 2 hours behind. On our way back to our branch the light came on again at highway speed and 30 seconds later the engine went into "limp home" mode and then shut itself off. We came to a rest on the side of the highway, tilted slightly into a ditch. After calling the local service manager we were informed that the head gasket had blown and the last technician to drive the truck was supposed to refill the coolant and let us know about the issue. We hiked down the road with the empty coolant bottles the last tech left for us and brought back 20 gallons of water, filling the expansion tank. So we should be good as long as we kept tabs on the water level, right? Nope. The water level sensor was placed in in a position where we couldn't fill the tank high enough for it to read the tank as full due to the angle of the truck in the ditch. It wouldn't start without a "safe" reading from the sensor and we couldn't level the truck out without it's own power. That sensor left us stranded for 3 hours until a repair truck arrived and had us running in less than 10 minutes by jacking up the low side of the truck. Now imagine losing half a day during harvest for the same bullshit reason.

Not to be nitpicky, but a vehicle with a blown head gasket is not a "perfectly functional vehicle." I'm amazed you were able to drive any distance with it at all. Must have been a tiny leak: I've blown head gaskets on two vehicles and the most I was able to get was about 5 miles before all the coolant went out the exhaust.

>but a vehicle with a blown head gasket is not a "perfectly functional vehicle."

…leading us back to why the sensors try to stop you completing the destruction of your engine. No common sense.

Maybe a BIT off topic...but I've got some experience here...We're seeing the death of EXCLUSIVELY family farms. The truly family farms that are surviving and even thriving are those that are diversifying. They're using their tractors to plant their soy beans than leasing them to the neighbor to plant their corn or wheat. Leasing their neighbors trucks to deliver their corn while the neighbors use them for wheat. All the while keeping the trucks/tractors/* on the move the entire year.

The issue in the article is starting to hit medium sized farms. When old tractors broke they pulled them into the shop and fixed them. Now they can't even diagnose without having the local dealer come out. During harvest time a tractor being down for 12 hours is HUGE. Like make it or break your year huge.

Even the "medium sized" tractors require a service tech with a laptop to come out for almost everything. Want to shift around your planting? Tech. Get a new field? Tech. Changing the type of seeds? tech. Farmers HATE those techs.

Also this issue is a HUGE issue in cars and other consumer things. Which is where it will probably be fought in the end. If I buy a car today, in 20 years it's pretty assured I will NOT be able to find a computer or any information about the ECU on how to tune the engine or use the ECU to diagnose drive train issues. They're hiding the ECU specs in the name of safety and emissions. In the end it's hurting consumers and shops in a big way.

Lots of family farms own tractors worth more than $200K, and combines worth more than $500K. They're paying significant interest to the bank for the privilege, but owning equipment that can cover twice the land in a day is a lot cheaper than buying and maintaining two smaller tractors (and accompaning accessories) and hiring a farmhand.

Like my family.

Also, small farmers buy a lot of tractors second, third, fourth-hand. Many are still running 50 years later. This is as much an attempt to kill the secondary market and the right to resell.

Without being able to buy and fix up used farm parts/equipment, many (including my family) would be fiscally unable to farm - full stop.

This is something to consider with any software-driven systems now... what's the realistic lifetime of the system? Will the vendor always be there to support the software? Ten year old software is a problem. Twenty year old software is a HUGE problem, from a vendor point of view.

There will always be tinkerers that take outdated hardware and breathe new life into it via new custom software. The problem lies in the new legal restraints placed around the marriage of the software and the hardware. I'll add, when I say "tinkerer" I'm not talking about an amateur hobbyist. I'm talking about the professionals who live and breathe in the world of after-market parts and their repair.

So this is the plot to Robots then?

>but owning equipment that can cover twice the land in a day is a lot cheaper

It can make the difference between a successful harvest or not; but neither strategy is a guarantee. As an example, if you have your cotton defoliated and then your harvester goes on strike for two or more days, any rain in the interim will destroy your crop.

Hiring a farmhand is cheap. Really, they work for almost nothing. But; the ones who know how to run the equipment are busy at harvest time.

I guess it depends on where you live. In Saskatchewan you're competing against the oil industry for workers, so full-time hands aren't cheap.

It's not just mega-tractors that are software-controlled these days. It's all tractors. Including those used by "small family farms".

I understand that. It's not just tractors either, it's every implement from planters to bailers to rippers, discs and plows. Everything is chipped and controlled from the main-screen in the cab.

But the individuals who have the power, money, and influence to do actually change anything are the large-scale farmers. They are not invested in changing the system; it works for them.

Perennial polyculture food forests reduces the advantage of high tech equipment. Nature does the work of growing. Replanting is rare. Harvesting is more of a manual process.

Polyculture farming may be the next big thing in farming, enabled by machine vision automated systems.

A typical small farmer in Saskatchewan can harvest 100-200 acres of wheat by himself on a single day using a modern combine harvester. Manual harvesting is not an option.

I don't think people outside of the prairies understand the scale of some of these farms.

The average Sask farm was 1668 acres as of 2011.

What are the yields like? What would doing that for all food do to the price of food?

This[1] RAND paper indicates perennial polyculture farming could increase yields for poor, third-world, subsistence farmers. Which is a very good thing.

But it seems unlikely to approach the yields of annual monoculture farming. (One quote: "The biggest difference, however, comes from considering perennial cereals. Most of the cereals that people eat (such as wheat, rice, oats, and corn/maize) are grown in annual plantings and often in monocultures. Since cereals account for at least half of dietary energy world-wide, converting that production to perennial polycultures with mixed intercropping would be a significant change in worldwide agriculture.") That's a bad thing; I'd like to see more use of these techniques, for all of the primary benefits mentioned in the paper. (The yield thing for subsistence farmers is a secondary benefit.)

[1] And it would help if I added the link: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/... [PDF]

Yields are pretty high. Though there are many products. So you won't necessarily have high yielding corn, but you will overall have more food & materials.

The fruits tend to be more of a mixed bag that is best distributed & consumed locally.

> What would doing that for all food do to the price of food?

Note that conventional petrol agriculture is heavily subsidized. Removing the subsidy will increase the price of food. It will favor small scale, high nutrition, gardening/farming. It will reduce waste as well.

I wonder if it will ever make sense for full vertical integration of agriculture? Could one company own the seed DNA, land, all related equipment, and sell the outputted product directly to consumers?

Could technology ever give one company such a great advantage that they could buy land at a price which would be a great loss to everyone else? The answer could be less about technology and more about the subsidized enforcement of intellectual property law and the strength or weakness of anti-trust law.

We look at this from an IP right/wrong standpoint, but a lot of moral questions regarding food production sit outside that realm as long as many people are either not getting enough food or getting too much of food that is damaging their bodies.

> I am in my early 30's and I guarantee I live to see the death of the actual family farm.

Maybe the small corn and soybean farms. Which is a race to the bottom anyway.

Small farms are booming here in MI but they are all either in veggies, mixed livestock systems, fruit, dairy or specialty crops of some sort.

Small farmers need to think outside the box, adjust to the changing times and maximize their ROI/acre.

- software dev with agroecology background

Independent farming is under siege by corporate agriculture, but it isn't dead. And independent farmers need tractors too.

It doesn't help that over 70% of farming subsidies go to ~10% of the farms in the country.

This doesn't only affect the US. Pretty much the entire world buys John Deere, Ford, Lamborghini, etc tractors.

I noticed a different flavor of this same logic with edited DVD's back in the 2000's. In Utah, there was a thriving edited DVD rental business during this time. Essentially, Mom and Pop shops would buy a DVD, take out the sex, language, and violence, and rent the edited version.

Hollywood complained that these companies were illegally making copies, so the mom and pop rental stores started to include the original copy as well with the edited copy, to prove that they were not making illegal copies.

Ultimately, all of these companies were put out of business because the courts ruled that just because you bought a DVD, you don't have the rights to modify it because it causes "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies". I find it interesting that the issue was harming the creative artistic expression, not financial at all, since, they were not pirating the films, so in truth, Hollywood was selling more DVD's since people who wouldn't normally watch a movie with 75 f-words in it, might actually watch the edited version.

Of course, in today's world, there's not many products that we can buy that did not have artistic expression involved in building that product. My house was artistically designed by an architect, if I don't like the kitchen, would I offend his artistic expression by remodeling? My phone was definitely "designed", but maybe I don't like showing off the apple logo on the back, so I put a cover on it, am I offending the artistic expression? If I'm not able to modify a product, do I really own it at all?

> My house was artistically designed by an architect, if I don't like the kitchen, would I offend his artistic expression by remodeling?

Depends on the contract you signed. I'm not sure how this applies to private homes or the US, but I recall architects preventing functional modifications of public structures in several cases in Germany. Also, copyright also covers architecture (and also, look up the legal situation of taking pictures of the Eiffel tower at night for a laugh).

> do I really own it at all?

Again, depending on the legislature, no you don't. And because Americans value their freedom so much, you also have the freedom to cut down your basic rights by entering into a contract. In other countries the nanny state protects us from doing that, preventing the free enterprise from creating a situation where you might have to do so involuntarily (e.g. if you need a phone and all phone contracts are ridiculous).

The linked article is good as far as it goes, but it fails to take the next logical step and call for the simple repeal of the anti-circumvention section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today. It was sold to Congress as a non-controversial way to implement a pair of (yawn) WIPO Copyright Treaties. The DMCA was approved unanimously in the Senate and by a process reserved for non-controversial legislation in the House; there was not even a recorded vote.

This is federal law as buggy and outdated code, which is badly in need of refactoring. I wrote about a proposed law to defang the DMCA back in 2003, once some of the 1201 problems became clear: http://news.cnet.com/Congress-mulls-revisions-to-DMCA/2100-1... But because of the influence of the copyright lobby, no amendments have ever succeeded.

I wrote more about a better way to approach 1201 and, more broadly, federal DRM policy in this law review article here: http://mccullagh.org/misc/articles/michigan.state.drm.0605.p...

While letting people know about John Deere's comments to the Copyright Office is great, the only reason the Copyright Office has a role here is that 1201 authorizes them to set exemptions. But why should we have to beg the Feds for exemptions when the underlying logic of 1201 is suspect?

At the very least 1201 deserves to be debated in Congress with an understanding of what it actually does and how it affects modern technology. When it was introduced 18 years ago, nobody could have known, and that debate has never happened.

> I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today.

I shake my head at this.

Everybody in tech with 2 brain cells predicted this.

The DMCA isn't buggy. It is functioning precisely as designed--protecting big businesses.

>Everybody in tech with 2 brain cells predicted this.

Cite, please? Claiming, somewhat rudely, that was the case doesn't make it true.

If you were prescient enough to publicly criticize the anti-circumvention sections of the DMCA in 1996-1997, you were virtually alone. The lone voices of criticism I remember came from the American Library Association and American University's Peter Jaszi. By 2000 or so, sure, some people had realized the problems, but what I'm talking about is what happened before 1201 became law.

Here's one example: the DMCA was approved by both chambers of Congress and became law in October 1998. EFF's home page in October 1998 doesn't even mention the votes or the DMCA at all: https://web.archive.org/web/19981201054106/http://www2.eff.o...

Of course, the EFF has arguably done more than any other single group to fix DMCA 1201 since then. But, again, I'm talking about when the legislation was still in Congress.

Well, "The Right to Read" was published in February of 1997 in "Communications of the ACM".

So, it was enough of a problem that a mainstream computer research publication (which normally has a lag of 6-12 months) published it. In early 1997.

Please do remember that you cannot rely on Google for history prior to about 1998. (Try hunting for information about VB6 programming for a concrete non-controversial example).

Also, please do remember that we were fighting things on multiple fronts. Encryption was still a munition. The web was still in its infancy. DVD's had just come out in 1995 and file sharing was just reaching critical mass. Many of us were coordinating by email and Usenet(gasp) and long-distance phone(GASP!).

In addition, many people had an attitude that we didn't need to fight since it was impossible for the law to touch the Internet (damage and routing around it and all that hooey). Boy were they wrong.

To top it off, a bunch of companies that were the DotCom sweethearts were happy to sell out our rights in order to help their bottom lines. They were quite happy to support the DMCA, and many are now successful venture capitalists (they learned from Steve Jackson to sell out to the government). These folks are quite happy to whitewash their involvement in lobbying for the DMCA.

So we were there. And we were fighting against it. We were just heavily outgunned.

I am not a lawyer, so I'm probably wrong on some of the finer points here, but I'm going to postulate an analogy here.

Why can't we equate the software inside a computer inside a vehicle with the mechanical equivalent? What then would our rights be?

It obviously doesn't require permission to move a valve or a gear around. Therefore, it shouldn't require permission to move a few bits.

It also doesn't require permission to draw a diagram of your changes and tell your neighbor what you did.

On the further extreme, one could potentially draw a diagram of the entire vehicle. At some point you're copying the entire idea, and the lawyers can fill in how this is protected. In this analogy, the computer code replacing it should then be protected the same way?

Wait, are you saying that we should have the right to inspect the software running on our cars? Given that our life depends on it? Given that innocent people has been jailed because of undisclosed bugs?

This would prevent car companies from denying their responsibilities. Think of the chil^W shareholders!

>Why can't we equate the software inside a computer inside a vehicle with the mechanical equivalent? What then would our rights be?

There really isn't a mechanical world equivalent to the DMCA anti-circumvention law or the derivative works restriction of copyright.

I think the DMCA anti-circumvention laws should just be repealed since it doesn't appear to be effective.

And I think there is a good argument that modifying software you license already is fair use.

I always wonder whether the legal framework for software has ended up different than other things because of its fundamental differences, or whether it's because it was invented in a different era. Is it software that is different or is it the modern legal structure that is different?

Nothing has changed, licenses have always been in the law.

Probably wasn't very clear – I wasn't trying to say anything about actual legal changes (although that's interesting too), I was wondering if instead legal culture has changed. I'm wondering if there's any fundamental difference between machines and software that causes the former to be predominantly owned while the latter is predominantly licensed, or whether it is instead because software is coming of age in a different legal and/or political and/or economic ecosystem. Or perhaps machinery went through a similar phase where licenses were more common – I have no idea if that's the case, and I'm curious to know.

Always? I don't think so. Copyright is a few hundred years old at most.

License predates copyright.

"Why can't we equate the software inside a computer inside a vehicle with the mechanical equivalent? What then would our rights be?"

Well, probably because software is unlike the mechanical equivalent. How could it not be? When I own a hammer, and I sell it to you and hand it to you, you have it and I don't. Music scores, software, movies etc. don't work that way, so they need a different system to work in. That system is based on contracts, because we already had those.

No legal or moral principle mandates we treat all software identically under the law without respect to use case, though. Tractor firmware, Adobe Photoshop and that digital copy of the U2 album you didn't want are all software, but they're expressions of very different things with distinguishing characteristics. In the case of the tractor firmware, an obvious distinguishing characteristic is that the firmware is just as critical to the function of the tractor as any mechanical part. I don't see any reason why the law couldn't mandate that you own your copy of that firmware. (Actually, I don't see any reason why the law couldn't mandate that in all the cases I mentioned; I think people on both sides of the IP debate are making a categorical error by assuming that the zero marginal cost of software reproduction changes everything. It doesn't. It just changes, well, the marginal cost.)

In another comment, I think you said that you thought describing this as "challenging the notion of ownership" as pandering to the (presumably anti-IP) audience. Maybe, but there's very little difference in practice between "you do not actually own your tractor" and "okay, you own your tractor, but don't own this critical thing without which the tractor cannot run, and you're not allowed to modify that thing in any way or even replace that thing with something you can modify." The second clause doesn't give whoever owns that critical thing possession of your tractor, but it gives them at least some level of control of your tractor. Maybe you're comfortable with that, maybe you're not -- objectively the same case can be made for my iPhone, after all, and I'm generally okay with that. But if my iPhone is put out of commission for a week by a firmware cockup I'm just going to be inconvenienced, whereas a farmer might lose a lot of potential income if that comes at the wrong time. I don't think it's irrational to argue that the law should recognize that difference.

Why can't we simply ask if this could be done for 'mechanical programming' and apply the same logic.

You don't own that full mechanical engine's construction, you just have a license to use it for the lifetime of the vehicle.

If that wouldn't stand, then how is it any different than code except that code is on a much smaller and and more detailed level. At the end of the day, it is still physical components following the laws of physics to render some result. Does the fact it is more complicated allow for it to stand? In which case, how complex when the fully mechanical engine need to become for the same logic to be applied?

The intangibility of code makes the marginal cost of a copy $0, which in turn raises the spectre of copyright law.

You can't copy an engine made of steel, so copyright law is moot.

You can't copy an engine made of steel, so copyright law is moot.

That's an interesting point, because you can literally build a copy of substantial portions of a car (engine, transmission, axles, brakes, etc.) from entirely aftermarket parts, for certain popular components. Many of these parts don't make any claims about licensing the designs from the original company but they do claim "drop-in" compatibility.

But you can. The cost is higher, but you can make a copy. So if the cost is really small (not $0, but small) it changes? Also to note, in these cases, we are talking about both the code and the rest of the machine. Is this to say that if any part of the machine can be copied for close to $0, we can remove ownership? Any single piece of that engine can be easily and cheaply copied, so once again, why the difference?

The laws of the physical world mean that, if you give/sell an object to another party, you no longer have access to it yourself. This is where concepts like the first sale doctrine come into play - it's your one tangible thing, and you can do with it whatever you like. You control that one, and only that one, instance of the thing.

Intangibles can be given/sold to another party without relinquishing your use of the original (because copies are free). You can buy one CD and gives copies of the music on it to 1,000,000 people without cost, and without giving up your right to the original. Even if you could copy an engine for relatively cheaply, the same economics do not apply.

Therefore, an exception exists to our physical property laws to cover this edge case: copyright law. As userbinator notes, there are other areas of intellectual property law that may apply to physical goods (e.g. patents), but you asked what the difference is between digital programming and mechanical: the difference is that digital programming is intangible, so it can be copied ad naseum, so the ownership exception we call copyright law applies.

But what makes it intangible? The really cheap (but still non-zero) cost to copy? In which case, why would this not apply to any physical machine that has a really cheap cost to copy?

It seems the answer is 'Because it doesn't.' at which point I see copyright law needing to be overhauled.

For example, why can my painting be protected by copyright but my engine design not? And if they are both protected by copyright, then why can't I just give a license to use the engine design while selling them the actual physical material (N kilos of iron, M kilos of carbon, etc.)?

Logic isn't applied, law is applied. The DMCA and associated copyright law distinguishes between these cases and puts these specific restrictions on one case and not the other. Just because something is analogous to another thing in some way doesn't mean both must be either legal or illegal together. You can put whatever you want into a law, so long as it is constitutional, and the Constitution explicitly provides Congress with the ability to enact copyright laws, even dumb ones.

If Deere and GM prevail, then we need to change the laws to recognize that these vehicles aren't being purchased, but leased. There are accounting and tax implications for the lessor and the lessee that need to be resolved.

Also, due to the notion that is being put forward that the reason for this distinction is for safety then all maintenance liabilities for the life-span of the vehicle should rest with the manufacturer. That means all fluids, wipers, brake pads, tires, emissions equipment...I'd like to see that condition tacked on.

Triple Net leases in real estate are an example of well established precedent contrary to the belief you are expressing.

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

Okay, but when's the last time a piece of real estate ran over a child? I'm being a bit drastic, sure, but we're talking about a mobile, several thousand pound object. As your link shows, the notion of casaulty with respect to liability still engages the owner / lessor with obligations with respect to legal standards. The NNN lease may exist, but it's not a very palatable notion, IMO, especially when applied to something like a vehicle.

A running over a child equivalent would be falling down unexpectedly or a small portion caving in.

When I was 7, all the bricks in one corner of the kitchen fell down. Just randomly (probably decaying, but unnoticed because of the paint) The lady taking care of me was less than 5 feet away.

This is what happens when lawyers run your company.

I was funded out of a John Deere Technology Innovation Center (JDTIC) during my PhD. Their approach to data was what ultimately pushed me to quit the program and go back to work. Everything was priceless and proprietary, yet nothing ever was done with it.

They insisted all research conducted by students was performed on their computers, which in itself was only annoying. The part that killed it (in addition to the promise of field data that never came after several years on the project) was that every library installed had to be approved by their IT security team.

I kid you not: the datetime library in Perl was not allowed.

On the upside, quitting the PhD has been an awesome decision, so I guess I should thank them.

Let's go reduction ad absurdum with this:

Imagine that this also applies to medical equipment and that you do not own your own mechanical heart beating in your chest. Furthermore, only franchised doctors will be allowed the encryption key to tweak your heart settings.

Will the company that provided you with your heart reserve the right to terminate the software license, and consequently your life, at will? Will they be allowed to stop tweaks of the software that could save your life? Will the unfranchised paramedic be legally forced to not save your life because to do otherwise would result in a DMCA violation?

Another point is that what if everything goes to hell? What if all of our tools are worthless as soon as communication infrastructure goes down? Imagine having the landscape littered with machines so productive as to easily end oncoming starvation while we pull plows with our bare hands. Short term gain for long term misery.

Nothing absurd about it: there have already been cases of closed source pacemakers that had security vulnerabilities that won't be fixed by the seller (arguing they can't replace the firmware) and can't be fixed by the buyer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo!_The_Genetic_Opera is something you might find an interesting watch.

I think it is interesting to frame this debate in terms of the near future of self driving cars. The true benefit of those cars will only be realized when they dominate the road and can freely communicate with each other. That could lead to crazy things like stop lights and stop signs disappearing and cars flying through intersections at nearly full speed. But what happens when individual owners start altering the software of these machines? Let's say they "overclock" their speed to travel at 105% of "normal". That would put not only themselves, but everyone on the road at risk. It would threaten to prevent the whole system from realizing its potential. Should that person still have the right to alter the car they own? I simply don't know.

The article touches on that a bit and the point they make is that speeding and changing emissions settings are already illegal and we already have enforcement agencies in place. So additional copyright-based restrictions don't make a lot of sense here.

I'd also point out that driving on public roads is a licensed privilege (at least in the USA) - so it is conceivable that a car owner could loose the rights to drive their vehicle on public roads (potentially putting others at risk) with out loosing the rights to modify their vehicle.

Well that's fine. You license me the tractor for $X per month and let me cancel that license and return it on a reasonable period of notice, and you have a deal. If you're going to license things, you can sell licenses, but if you're going to sell an object, I own the object.

I'm not sure that legal innovation obliging people to pay monthly for everything that comes with a EULA is really the most consumer-friendly way forward here...

This article is really interesting to me as I just bought a John Deere (sure it is just a lawn tractor). During the course of the sale I was chatting with the salesman about their larger agriculture tractors as this store mostly does sales for farmers. He informed me about all the technological advances, soil sampling they do and data they collect and give to the farmer. Then the farmer can load this in their tractor and the sprayer or whatever attachment they are using can adapt based on the gps coordinates. So a previously identified area can be treated with a different mixture on the fly and the farmer does nothing but ride along.

The article mentions that farmers are opting for non-software based vehicles. However from the way things seemed when I spoke with the salesman it is the very opposite.

It is fantastic to watch.

Custom farming was the wave of the future in the early 2000's, when you had to have special equipment to do it. Now anyone can do it themselves with this equipment. You can spot apply chemicals and fertilizer, reducing cost and environmental impact. There is a literal overhead map with red-zones, for when you get bored and want to watch something. Combine this technology with gps guided auto-steer, and the machine operator becomes a bag of meat sitting there to turn it on and off as needed. I have a long-time friend who does custom farming. He's really good on his PSP and Gameboy something-or-other.

As for "However from the way things seemed when I spoke with the salesman it is the very opposite." That's a salesman. He wants to sell whatever he has; if he had old equipment, the market would be swinging that way if you asked him. His impression will always be that people want what he's selling. . . .

Very interesting. I did not know this issue extended all the way to farming equipment. At the same time, I can't say I'm terribly surprised given the state of things currently.

Thread hijack: Am I the only one who finds Wired's... "unique"... styling of links absolutely obnoxious?

In support of your hijacking: no, you're not. I find it annoying. It has the stink of "we've got to do something different but we don't know what...let's mess with something that isn't broken!"

As abhorrent as I find John Deere's anti-ownership approach, I say let them continue down that road. It will provide another entrepreneur the opportunity to create and sell a more easily maintainable, you-bought-it-so-you-own-it alternative.

God knows the home appliance space needs that kind of alternative.

I'm in violent agreement with you here -- the notion of a smart home platform, for example, that allows me to customize it via an API, or, if I choose, by tinkering with its basic software, sounds awesome to me.

But I'm a programmer, and a tinkerer.

In order for this to be a viable mainstream reality, some enterprising company will need to establish a platform or system of consumer-grade components that bridges the gap between "general population computer literacy" and "ability to tweak one's electronic things".

In reality, that may be (for now) an unbridgeable gap. Maybe the only route to digital freedom is deeper digital literacy on the part of the average consumer.

But one thing is for sure -- as long as laws like the DMCA are in place, the deck is stacked against evolution towards DIY utopia.

And in the meantime, everyone who exists now just gets boned. Sorry, everyone who lives in the present instead of some theoretical future!

Right but the issue with that approach is that the better alternative rarely appears. Your own example of the home appliance shows that.

Its coming to consumer vehicles as well. [0] This will be (already is) an industry standard.

0: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/automakers-say-you-don...

The internet of things means this issue is coming to every single product in the world. If it's possible to add electronics to it, it will have a chip.

And that means that software IP rules now apply to hardware. Those rules need changing.

It's more urgent with physical products than with traditional software because tractors need repair on a regular basis. Copyright is taking away the independence of farmers.

> I did not know this issue extended all the way to farming equipment.

It's not just farming equipment. The heavy equipment industry uses closed and highly protected diagnostics tools. They don't want to give the control of the internal of the machine away to the customer.

Funny, when DRM first came on the radar over a decade ago enlightened individuals noted that the same principles of deny-of-ownership could be extended to physical objects ... precisely in the way described on this article.

This was my first thought as well. Why is it that people have no issue with your laptop vendor "claiming ownership" of your laptop, but are so alarmed when the same principle is applied to a larger machine?

Yes, I realize that this is not an entirely fair comparison. However, the parallels between this article and the "war on general purpose computing" seem relevant...

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

Bell did this with their telephones in the 60's and 70's. Customers could not own their own phone while using Bell's service. They even went so far as to stamp "BELL SYSTEM PROPERTY" into the molding. Even after they allowed 3rd party phones, they still charged a monthly fee for the privilege. It wasn't until their divestiture that they began allowing their customers to use their own phones without incurring a fee. Though it seems that was due to competitive pressure more than legal pressure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone#Ownership_a...

Open source answer is:http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/

(I'm not saying it's a viable answer at this point but the work they are doing is intrguing.)

It's really just a matter of time until such manufacturing has a viable open source mainstream alternative. Then we can look forward to small dev shops building affordable custom robots for everyday use.

"Affordable" and "custom" tend to not go hand in hand. There are many people building tractors from scratch right now, just hop on YouTube for a look.

Want a custom accounting package for your small business? I'll build you a simple one for $30,000. In the meantime, you can go buy QuickBooks for $199 right off Intuit's site.

Here's a plug for Open Source Ecology. One of their designs is for an Open Source tractor, made from inexpensive commodity parts. The advantage is the plans are open & maintenance is also open.

http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/

Articles like this always push me towards the Stallman way of thinking that all software should be open source and everyone should have the right to modify/fix/change the software in any way they see fit as long as they aren't trying to resell it as their own work. It's a tough subject, I make an extraordinarily good living from writing closed source software but I constantly feel as though I should support open source software more.

> GM went so far as to argue locking people out helps innovation. That’s like saying locking up books will inspire kids to be innovative writers, because they won’t be tempted to copy passages from a Hemingway novel.

This is one of the best analogies I've heard.

Article is just wrong. One does not own software on device he buys. Software ownership means that one can issue new licenses, which is clearly not a case here. One can not just start selling Windows, because he bought laptop where they are installed. You just get license to use software.

But other side is customer protection. One buys tractor with expectation to be able to fix it and modify it. If that is not true, John Deere is selling broken stuff, and customers should get their money back.

> Article is just wrong. One does not own software on device he buys. Software ownership means that one can issue new licenses, which is clearly not a case here. One can not just start selling Windows, because he bought laptop where they are installed. You just get license to use software.

This idea needs to die. Copyright ownership means that one can make and distribute copies of software. Software ownership means you own one or more copies, which you should be able to with as you wish within the bounds of copyright law. You do not need a license to use a book; you do to copy it. Software should be the same, and that companies like Deere, GM, and 8,476 software companies are trying to assert the validity of this "license to use" is a perversion of copyright law.

Exactly. If I buy a book, I can write on the pages. I can fold, spindle, and mutilate. I can rip out a page. I own that book.

I can't sell a copy, though - not even a copy of my modified, ripped up version. Not without a license from the author/publisher of the original.

John Deere would say that you can reflash, smash, or replace the eeeprom if you want. But you can't create a new piece of software based on the old one.

I think you should be able too, because what is the harm, but I don't think the book analogy holds.

You aren't allowed to rewrite a book, even if you keep the copy yourself.

If I understand correctly, yes, you absolutely are allowed to rewrite a book if you keep the copy yourself.

The thing that strikes me, having read a couple of articles on the topic, is that the OEMs in these cases think the ownership of the code is valuable enough to jump through these legal hoops and take the hit for any negative reactions or PR that ensues. On the face of it the software would not seem to be a big component of what a farmer buys a John Deere tractor for. It has to be there, to run the thing, but does it really add that much proprietary value to the product? I don't blame the OEM for stumbling over how to deal with the ownership issues, but if I'm correct and the software is not a big part of the value prop for the equipment then just open source it and call it a day. Whats the downside of that? Someone will copy your code and start making their own tractors? Deere must feel their code is that much better than their competitors, but it's hard to believe that is really true in a practical sense.

What's really wrong with this? As a provider of goods or services, I should have the right to say, "I'm only renting you this, not selling it to you. If you want to buy it, go see someone else."

If I build a house, I should be able to rent it out, and not sell it if I want to keep it. If the market demands builders to sell it, some will find a way. There's no intrinsic right to forcing people to have an option to buy.

If I make something that requires tedious upkeep, and will hurt my reputation if it breaks down, shouldn't it be ok for me to say, "I'm only going to rent this to you, and will take care of the upkeep myself."? (Example: A piece of machinery in a factory)

Uber is selling rides. Should they be forced to sell cars too? (ok, that may be a little stretch, but it's along the same line of thought)

If enough people want to fully own cars and trucks, they'll go somewhere else and drive JD and GM out of business.

> What's really wrong with this? As a provider of goods or services, I should have the right to say, "I'm only renting you this, not selling it to you. If you want to buy it, go see someone else." ...

It's a good question, but an important consideration is whether your customer has the option of saying no. For example, if you are a small farmer, you can't really negotiate with tractor manufacturers because you lack the market power; you just take what they give you. If they all deny you ownership, you're stuck.

Consider someone who wants a smartphone that doesn't track them, a credit card without waiving legal rights ... I was thinking the other day of people who might have been opposed to lead in gasoline (I assume there must have been some), but they had no choice. Their fate was determined by those who had the market power to control the technology.

Also, most people don't undertand the implications of what they are buying. Nobody has time to study and learn all that.

Just because you want an option doesn't mean you should get it. Sometimes (most of the time) what this weirdo wants is completely unreasonable. For example, how is a cell phone going to contact a tower without giving away its location, if for no other reason than it can only contact towers within a certain limited distance?

Do we really want to force companies to give the option, rather than the market? I'm not 100% Ayn Rand, but my tendency is to let consumers drive what they want to pay for. If there is profit in giving people what they ask for, someone will generally do it.

This isn't to say that market failures don't exist - they do. I'm just skeptical when people with agendas point them out without proof.

> If there is profit in giving people what they ask for, someone will generally do it.

Ideally, yes, but: 1) Much that is valuable to poeple or to society does not maximize profit and is not provided by the marketplace [1] 2) the market isn't really free; for example, companies use their power (politically and in the market) and collude (explicitly and implicitly) to protect their profits and marketshare, and 3) consumers can't be educated about everything they buy; there simply isn't enough time or available resources; therefore vendors, staffed with industry experts, can easily take advantage of them.

> Do we really want to force companies to give the option ...

I don't mean to play down this concern, which is a serious one for me too.

[1] As examples: The technology you are using to read this posting, from protocols to your possibly FOSS browser; almost all knowledge generated at academic institutions, from the theory of relativity to vaccinations to knowledge of society; the security provided by soldiers; our political system, etc.

I think the problem with this line of thinking is that most people think they're buying a car (including on board software). If it were clear to everyone that you are in fact only leasing the software, it might be better.

How can that be made any more clear than it already is? Pretty much all software a typical consumer ever uses works this way.

But non-tech people think of computers and phones as running software, not their cars. In the car, it's just a "radio" or "navigation system."

The only reasonable way to stop that is do not buy shit from them.

I had an HP printer that wouldn't run if the ink cartridge wasn't original HP, which are expensive as hell, so I dumped it and never bought HP again.

Now Epson is selling printers with refillable cartridges. Guess who's gonna get my money if I ever need a printer again?

Free market in action.

It's pretty clear to me what a reasonable solution to this would be. If you buy a laptop you don't "own" the OS you have a license to it and you can install another OS on it you just won't be able to get tech support for the non-standard OS. If you buy a tractor you should be able to do the same and the manufacturer should be required to provide enough information about the hardware systems and their functions that if someone wants to write a open source tractor OS they could. (Think DDWRT, for Tractors)

I don't understand how the concept of EULA's and licenses bundled with physical products you buy can cooperate with the legal concept of fit-for-purpose. If I go to the store, see advertisement or get a sale description of a thing and then buy it, shouldn't the thing then be usable without having to go through a second agreement at some late date?

From a consumer protection side, it sound obvious that whatever the deal is between buyer and seller, it should be made clear at the point of purchase. If you can't use the machine, the car, the ithingy without being limited by a untold second contract, then its not fit for purpose and should not be sold.

Worse, from a market perspective, tricking customer in this way makes for broken competition and horrible incentives. Any companies that do not use DRM and licenses to limit unofficial repair parts and similar consumables goods will loose to those who permits its. The more you can trick the consumer, the more you can earn money on products after sale, money which the competition has to earn by making a more expensive competitive product.

I wonder what we would found if we got a look into the source of these systems. As far as I know BMW's software heavily depends on Free/Open Source Software and for the other'S since we are in the embeded enviroment I could imagine the same. Would make my day if these companies would suddenly get the tables turned and instead of Copyright it would be a Copyleft issue.

They are doing it to protect the millions that they've invested into the autonomous driving software.

Imagine this scenario, deep inside of a random 3rd-party firmware was an obscure piece of code that allowed complete remote control of the tractor. Several remote killdozers is what you would then have to deal with. With access to the ECU(s) the hackers could even disable John Deere and the farmers control of the tractor.

Even a small bug would result in huge damage or loss-of-life.

Google and Tesla will for sure not allow access to their proprietary firmware / system code.

Just think about installing a custom Android ROM on a device with a very small community and then imagine that on a car or a tractor.

Stick with stock John Deere firmware and purchase from a competitor if you don't agree with their policies.

I remember this story from a couple of years ago. I was impressed that farmers are some of the first people to use autonomous vehicles and drones to manage and watch crops. Amazing times we live in.

As an aside, this is not the first round of this particular fight, and it has been won by consumers before. See the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act[1], for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...

I understand the outrage, but soon enough they'll just move the software to the cloud and then they'll really own it.

I'm not a lawyer, and I have a fairly pedestrian grasp of the DMCA.

My understanding is that the law, created in the Internet's infancy, is meant to protect and prevent direct copyright infringment.

Can anyone explain why they're allowed to (seemingly) abuse this act? They're not selling pirated copies of the tractor control software?

Under the DMCA anyone breaking a digital lock, no matter how trivial it is, has broken the law, regardless of whether the sell their results.

For a good example of how it has been abused in the past, look up Lexmark and how they tried to use crypto code to lock out competitors from providing third-party ink refills. I'm not sure what the eventual outcome was there.

Fortunately Lexmark lost that one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v._....

"Can anyone explain why they're allowed to (seemingly) abuse this act?"

Simple. It's not being abused. It's working as intended.

Looks like a perfect time for someone to open a nice tractor business. There is lots of money in tractors and while it takes a lot more than making a new iphone app, it certainly is less effort than floating cities or going to mars, which on here are propositions that are regularly treated seriously.

Side issue parent article claims that passages can't be copied because the pdf is locked. Other than workarounds to that (I don't know any but I am sure they exist) you could simply run OCR on screengrabs of the pages using something like adobe acrobat or similar.

If they are allowed to tell us we don't own our vehicles, they should be forced to remove words such as "own", "sale", "sell", etc from any and all communications. Period.

I don't see how this is different than anything else software-driven. I "own" my iPhone, but I don't "own" iOS--I just have an implied license to use iOS with the phone.

Fundamentally there may be little difference, but there are definitely cultural differences. Every farm has a repair shop. While some HN readers might also try to fix their cell phones, the vast majority of the population are not comfortable with that idea in the first place. In fact, telephones were typically the property of the telephone company back in the day, so there has never really been an expectation of being able to fix your own phone.

Having farm equipment that you cannot repair yourself is a significant deviation away from the status quo. Farm equipment breaks down frequently - more frequently than you might even imagine - so not being able to repair said equipment does raise alarms for some people. For field crops, you often only have a window of days to plant/harvest, so downtime can cost a fortune.

> implied license to use iOS

The license isn't implied. It's right there in the EULA to which you agreed when you opened the box and turned the phone on for the first time.

You've missed the point, and erected a strawman in the process. No one claims to "own" John Deere's software. No one is claiming the right to redistribution.

This fight is about the legal restraints preventing the owner of the equipment from modifying or repairing it.

If I own my phone (Android), why am I not "allowed" to install AOSP on it?

I can install Ubuntu on an HP laptop, why can't I install a ROM on my phone?

It's all B.S.

[IANAL]

The big play isn't about ownership. It's about liability.

If you own the tractor and something bad happens, it's product liability. Our intuitions of responsibility go back to the Code of Hammurabi.

If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.

If you license the tractor, well that's not quite so intuitive and there's lots of room to argue over the terms of the license rather than the arguing over legal precedent.

Ownership vs license doesn't really have much to do with negligence/torts

[IANAL]

It does in regard to who can have standing. A license can prohibit transfer to a third party by the purchaser.

A license also moves what is provided from product toward service and consequently from defects toward errors and omissions.

The applicable case law is different. The applicable statutes are different. People can't usually sue Microsoft every time Windows crashes.

Is this really the will of John Deere, or just that of its corporate lawyers coming up with something new to justify their own continued employment?

This is not a defense of John Deere or any other corporation that twists the law in ridiculous ways in their favor, but a genuine question. If you could pin down a higher-up at one of these places to find out what they really think, and ask whether this approach is actually good for their company, would anyone besides the lawyers say "yes"?

The USPTO is currently taking "reply" comments on this very matter (and other similar matters) http://copyright.gov/1201/

Proposed exemptions: http://copyright.gov/1201/docs/list-proposed-classes-1201.pd...

The initial comment period has lapsed. (Reply Comment Period Closes May 1, 2015)

>>USPTO Solicitation for comments on proposed rulemaking:

>>Section 1201 Exemptions to Prohibition Against Circumvention of Technological Measures Protecting Copyrighted Works: Second Round of Comments

>>The comments below were filed by parties who oppose the adoption of a proposed exemption. The initial round of comments were filed by proponents and other members of the public who support the adoption of a proposed exemption, as well as parties that neither support nor oppose an exemption.

>Due Dates for Public Comments and Associated Evidence

>The first round of public comment closed on February 6, 2015, and was limited to submissions from the proponents (i.e., those parties who proposed exemptions during the petition phase) and other members of the public who support the adoption of a proposed exemption, as well as any members of the public who neither support nor oppose an exemption but seek only to share pertinent information about a specific proposal. Any associated documentary and/or multimedia evidence was due by this date.

>The second round of public comment closes on March 27, 2015, and will be limited to members of the public who oppose an exemption. Opponents should present the full legal and evidentiary basis for their opposition. Any associated documentary and/or multimedia evidence must also be submitted by this date.

>The third round of public comment closes on May 1, 2015, and will be limited to proponents and supporters of particular proposals, and those who neither support nor oppose a proposal, in either case who seek to reply to points made in the earlier rounds of comments. Reply comments should not raise new matters, but instead be limited to addressing arguments and evidence presented by others. Any associated documentary and/or multimedia evidence must also be submitted by this date.

"He’s not alone: many farmers are opting for older, computer-free equipment." What's the percentage? That's actually the solution and it can extend to any device. Unfortunately, a majority of users don't seem to care. We can refuse to buy music, iPhones etc so we can force them to not do these nasty things, but the technology is irresistable and government(people) more often than not sides with corporations.

I work in IT in the car industry and we are part of the GENIVI aliance, see http://genivi.org/

> GENIVI® is a non-profit industry alliance committed to driving the broad adoption of specified, open source, In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) software.

GENIVI is getting some traction and perhaps this is the an answer to problems like the OPs link explains.

The company argues that allowing people to alter the software—even for the purpose of repair—would “make it possible for pirates, third-party developers, and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software.”

Next step: weld the hood shut so competitors can't see the parts.

The label "no user-serviceable parts inside" springs to mind...

Very good book on this topic: Against Intellectual Monopoly can be read online http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

Sorry if it upsets people, but Ownership has been gradually been destroyed over the years and this is just another example.

I could go on a Libertarian rant, but I'm sure you've already heard about cars being raided without a reason or private data being exposed.

Sad to live in a world like this.

It isn't really gradual. Real estate has traditionally allowed for restrictions on property. You can sell your House with a condition that if the person ever builds a fence.

Hell, whole neighborhoods had restrictions on selling to black people.

If you own a condo, there are tons of restrictions on it.

Does this really have anything to do with copyright law? Imagine I offer to sell you a tractor that contains no software, but comes with the condition that you hire me to fix it if it ever breaks down. Have I just 'destroyed the very idea of ownership'?

Does this mean they have to insure the tractors against loss and liability? If the farmers are just operators, they shouldn't be responsible for repairs and maintenance either? Seems like they could have opened Pandora's box.

Why do people farm?

John Deere owns your tractor. Monsanto owns your seed. The Bank owns your farms.

Why do people develop software? Your employer, assuming WFH, owns the software you write. Microsoft owns Visual Studio. Amazon owns the AWS servers.

What about the legal implications of this? If a vehicle is in a collision and there is indication that the software might be responsible, who takes the blame? This is going to get really bad.

If there's a demand for unlocked tractors, wouldn't some company somewhere grow to fill that demand? Or is the tractor world an anti-competitive monopoly?

For anyone interested in the concept, and looking for a techno-thriller novel, I highly recommend "Daemon" and "Freedom(TM)" by Daniel Suarez.

I think we just need to convince gun owners that gun companies are saying this about their guns. And then this problem goes away.

throwaway account

Introducing Tesla Electric Tractor Co.

In fairness, this is perfectly true, and they have a legitimate economic interest in making it difficult for people to do that - although I don't agree that this should extend to being able to use the DMCA. I feel like tinkering with your own machine is an obvious case of fair use, and the DMCA should be used in cases where large chunks of one firm's software turn up in the equipment of some other firm without an appropriate license.

On the other hand, If GM or John Deere were to respond with a shrug to reports of people bricking their vehicle through firmware experimentation - a risk which I think should fall firmly on the shoulders of the hacker - then there would be howls of outrage about the gear being engineered to fail, tinkerers held hostage, lives being put at risk and so on.

[unsanctioned modifications could alter their vehicles in bad ways.] They’re right. That could happen. But those activities are (1) already illegal, and (2) have nothing to do with copyright. If you’re going too fast, a cop should stop you—copyright law shouldn’t. If you’re dodging emissions regulations, you should pay EPA fines—not DMCA fines.

Hmm, that's true as far as the fines go, but the reality of our litigous society is that when other people become the unwilling victim of a negative externality, they'll go after whoever has the greatest ability to pay, so GM will get sued for allowing these things to happen. If they're legally protected from such suits, then every vehicle accident investigation will start with a software audit and if there's any deviation from the official firmware whatsoever the manufacturer will eschew all liability. If nobody can be sued, the the negative externality will fall upon the public.

And saying that this or that branch of the government should enforce prohibitions on illegal activity is facile; this overlooks the cost of detection and enforcement, since we can't track every vehicle. Experience shows that when people know there is a high probability of getting away with some anti-social action, there are enough trolls out there that it will become a fad; for example, look up 'coal rollers' on youtube - people who modify their pickup trucks to produce as much dirty exhaust as possible, and amuse themselves by making their vehicles belch smoke at people they don't like. Offsetting this tendency at the legal level would require one of two mechanisms; either lengthy sentences designed to offset the low probability of detection (which we have now, with dire consequences), or an a priori assumption of liability where vehicular misbehavior is reported and a vehicle is found to be running non-standard firmware (which would rightly be seen as an attack on due process). Since neither of these are palatable alternatives, the likely actual response is that either prices will be raised to offset the increased tort liability claims that will be brought against the manufacturer of the original equipment, or manufacturers will invest more and more in locking down their systems by physical and digital means, which will push courts (and especially juries) closer and closer to treating modification as evidence of criminal or tortious intent.

Basically the author is acknowledging the fact that there will be problems, but handwaving them into being 'someone else's problem'. Sorry to say so, but this is a common blind spot in the hacker mentality: when the marginal costs of modification fall asymptotically towards zero (because once you have knowledge and access, modifying one bit of code is as easy as any other in labor terms), the economic incentives for abuse rise, and so the probability of abuse taking place (not by you, dear reader, but by your less-scrupulous friend in the black hat over there) asymptotically approaches 1. When that abuse results in economic loss, the costs tend to land on other people as described above, and lots of hackers heap blame on the original manufacturer for not making the product sufficiently secure (the 'burglars are doing you a favor by showing you how easy it is to break into your house' argument, which is advanced with depressing regularity here).

Meanwhile, outside of Bizarroland, actual technology experts—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation—have consistently labeled the DMCA an innovation killer.

Indeed, but this argument depends on a hypothetical - that there would be even more innovation going on if not for the DMCA. By historical standards we already live in a period of astonishing innovation, so it's just as easy to make the argument that the DMCA has been followed by an increase in innovation. Look at the expansion of the internet, communications services, and the fact that many millions of people carry around smartphones and tablets that are far more powerful than state-of-the-art workstations were in 1998 when the DMCA was passed. One could argue that the time was right for Star Trek reboot when affordable personal technology became so good that the original TV show didn't look futuristic any more.

Thankfully, we aren’t alone. There’s a backlash against the slow creep of corporate product control.

Wow, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. A purely market-based response would be not to buy products that are sold this way, ie to do like those farmers who prefer older tractors, albeit somewhat less efficient ones. But realistically that's not going to happen because farmers are squeezed by debt cycles and automation pressures as much as anyone else, so if they don't use the latest technology sooner or later they end up having to sell the farm to an AgBiz conglomerate - which is, honestly, what I think this story is really about, although the writer isn't aware of that.

The reality is that everyone wants the latest and greatest technology (because more often than not it's objectively awesome even when it's not perfect), but few people have access to the increasingly vast sums of capital required to develop it. Fortunately the ever-increasing R&D costs of ever-shrinking hardware are offset for the hacker by the ever-increasing quality and accessibility of the software stack, so modern tinkerers can do at their desk what their grandparents used to do in the garage, so to speak. This is a Good Thing, but whereas previous generations of tinkerers and innovators tended to get a working prototype and then offer it to the existing manufacturers, new investors, or the public in order to raise capital to go into production, software hackers are in the novel position of having near-zero marginal costs of production and distribution, and don't seem to recognize that this creates a major economic disincentive for the manufacturers who develop the underlying technology platform in the first place, since any floating liability is likely to fall upon them.

There's been a fundamental economic dichotomy emerging with increasing clarity on HN over the last few years. Corporate and institutional actors that act as capital stores are regarded as oppressive when they deploy technical or legal security measures (DRM, DMCA being two obvious examples), but also blamed for security failures that result in breaches of custodial responsibility (personal data theft* or allowing their IT infrastructure to be used as an attack vector by malicious actors). I would argue that it's this increasing technological asymmetry that is driving the increasing economic asymmetry in western capitalism. To put it in a nutshell, when you are only one hack away from seeing your profit margins collapse to zero, you have every incentive to suck up as much cash as you possibly can on the front end before your incentive to produce any given product disappears.

We don't have a good theory of digital economics yet, and we're not going to get one as long as stakeholders on different sides of this complex question refuse to acknowledge any other interests but their own. Producers and manufacturers must respect their customers rights to adjust and adapt the high-value capital items they've paid for to the individual problems they were purchased to solve. And hackers need to recognize that every new hackable box of tricks that appears on the market actually involved a large collective effort by other people, and stop conflating discovery of how-it-works or how-to-copy-it with authorship.

* Funny how nobody has a problem with calling it personal data theft even though they strenuously object to use of the term as regards piracy. after all, when your personal data is stolen from BigCorp and resold to identity thieves, it's not like BigCorp has lost their copy of your data. I have yet to see anyone speaking up in favor of 'identity sharing' when it comes to their own data.

Come to think of it, linux and gnu don't come from the US.

So isn't open source bad for the US economy ?

Linus is from Finland, but of course RMS is from the US. So you're right, and wrong. :)

And he lives in Portland.

I thought RMS came from oxford...

Here is a simple solution. Licence of software gives you the right to reverse engineer and modify it for your use, but not distribute copies of it.

You sell software in US - you are mandated to give your customer that rights.

Why do you think that the very idea of ownership is so good?

The abstract answer: Legally enforceable protection for private property turns out to have some significant benefits for a society. It helps society develop past the warlord stage.

The concrete answer: The article gives some ways that the John Deere idea is bad. In particular, a tractor isn't just a thing that I buy. It's a tool, and I need it to work so that I can plant and harvest my crops. This "ownership" question isn't just a matter of me strutting around announcing to the world that I own it. The question is whether I have the right to repair it in order to get it back to work, or whether I have to wait for the authorized person to do the work.

"The article gives some ways that the John Deere idea is bad."

"Bad", is relative. "Bad" for whom? Deere or the farmer? Follow the money / power.

> John Deere may be out of touch, but it’s not alone. Other corporations, including trade groups representing nearly every major automaker, made the same case to the Copyright Office again and again.

In Capitalism, the game is to make monetary profit & control the market, above all else. It makes sense what John Deere is doing. They are just being good Capitalists.

They're also a great fucking company. Nerds care about this sort of bullshit. People who turn seeds into fruit into dollars care that the manufacturer will drop in with a helicopter to a field and get you going fast with a loaner part the size of your entire cubicle.

They also have interesting jobs available on their test farm for software engineers.

> the game is to make monetary profit & control the market

What you describe, basically is monopolism. It is well known, that monopolies are killing a free market.

> They are just being good Capitalists.

When this is true, than something is very wrong with Capitalism itself.

> It is well known, that monopolies are killing a free market.

In ecology, there's a concept call Ecological Succession. Likewise, in Capitalism, the free market is a stage in a succession toward monopoly. Capital tends to pool, leading to monopolies.

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

Applying concepts from one scientific discipline to other disciplines does seldom fit. I think it is more a sign of pseudo-scientific trickery to back the own thinking, that is most often used in unsound economical theories.

It is a fact, that while monopolies are good for the monopolists, it is bad for societies at large. And no "ecological" concepts can convince me from the opposite. One example: While bigger banks are good for the bankers, because countries have to rescue them, it is very bad for those countries, as everybody (except politicians) can see since 2008.

With your "ecological" theory, someone also could argue, that dinosaurs are better than mammals.

"What you describe, basically is monopolism. It is well known, that monopolies are killing a free market."

Sure, but the problem is that unconstrained free markets lead to monopolies.

The big fish eats the smaller fish. The big fish becomes bigger and more difficult to attack. (New competition.) And so on, and so on, until there can be only one, or an oligopoly.

The way to end this nonsense is to write and distribute a worm that bricks every single iDevice on Earth.

No, the way to end it is to build an alternative that is better in the eyes of the people willing to pay money for the devices. Spend your energy on building something rather than tearing down.

In that case, there would never have been war.

What you say, is the "correct" solution. The good, the improving, what helps society. I agree with you. But it's slow, fragile, and you should acknowledge that your established, strong, opposition, may play dirty.

Huh. So, like an iPhone, you don't get to see or modify the software on a tractor. What's new about that? Its the same with my desktop computer, come to think of it.

Are you saying you can't install the software you want on your computer? You can't replace the OS? Are you suggesting that this should be acceptable?

I don't think people should accept it, but I'm not hugely convinced that it should be enforced by the government.

Assume that John Deere has good analytics about the things that impact the TCO of these super tractors. Assume that some sensors are very effective at lowering that TCO. Assume that John Deere puts interlocks into the vehicle and prices it competitively based on the calculated assumption that those interlocks will lower their warranty costs.

Why should I have to pay extra so that you can have the freedom to hack your tractor?

No, just the part about not allowed to modify nor even examine the code on my computer, that is under license.

As for the iPhone, I think the way it works is definitely not acceptable.

This is boring, these guys are talking about software that existed (briefly) between the 80s-90s before the open source era. All this make the necessity of a stronger open source hardware. At least the automakers should let you replace their SW stack with an open source alternative.

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