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Nebraska is one of eight states in the US – including Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wyoming, Tennessee and Kansas – seeking to pass "right to repair" legislation. All eyes will be on the Cornhusker state when the bill has its public hearing on 9 March, because its unique "unicameral legislature" (it's the only state to have a single parliamentary chamber) means laws can be enacted swiftly. If this bill, officially named LB67, gets through, it may lead to a domino effect through the rest of the US, as happened with a similar battle over the right to repair cars. These Nebraska farmers are fighting for all of us.
Big agriculture and big tech – including John Deere, Apple and AT&T – are lobbying hard against the bill, and have sent representatives to the Capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska, to spend hours talking to senators, citing safety, security and intellectual property concerns.
John Deere has gone as far as to claim that farmers don't own the tractors they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for, but instead receive a "license to operate the vehicle". They lock users into license agreements that forbid them from even looking at the software running the tractor or the signals it generates.
Another article on the topic at Techdirt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:42PM (5 children)
Communism involves the sort of violent imposition that we're seeing proposed by this legislation; capitalism, in contrast, requires voluntary association.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 08 2017, @09:10PM (2 children)
>the sort of violent imposition that we're seeing proposed by this legislation
>violent imposition
>violent
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Letting a customer tinker with their own property now is considered "violence?" Or is this like another of those "all property is theft" sort of koans?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @10:18PM (1 child)
If it's the farmer's property, then there's already nothing preventing him from tinkering with it; there's no need for any violently imposed mandate.
It sounds like these things are not the farmer's property, and that such farmers are trying to use the violent imposition of the state to commandeer these things from the rightful owners; that's wrong. Instead, the farmers who object should join together and come up with a plan for re-negotiating their [future] agreements, or work with some other supplier, etc.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 08 2017, @10:36PM
If it's the farmer's property, then there's already nothing preventing him from tinkering with it
Other than John Deere or whoever siccing their team of ninja lawyers on him and suing him for everything he's worth, sure.
It sounds like these things are not the farmer's property
Yes, that's the core of the argument. The companies market these things as "you own them," then argue that technically that's not what the fine print said and you're only leasing them in perpetuity (or whatever lawyerese they use).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday March 09 2017, @02:11PM
The manufacturers are already using state violence to enforce their "license" against the legitimate owners of the hardware. This bill says that the state will no longer participate in that.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday March 09 2017, @03:47PM
Capitalism requires state violence to enforce things like the DMCA and consumer hostile contract terms. Without the threat of state violence, the manuals and diagnostic equipment would have already been duplicated and spread widely.