SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 08 2017, @09:38PM (2 children)
If customers are happily purchasing from a company that actually threatens to sue them for tinkering with their own property, I think the customers have a serious problem.
Really, it seems to me that the fundamental problem is the DMCA itself. (Aside: what "two acts" are they talking about here? "DRM" isn't a law, it's an industry acronym for something used in software. "DMCA" is a law, but only one.) I'm all for people having the right to repair their property, but it seems like this might be a band-aid for a fundamentally broken law, one which should be repealed or amended.
Anyway, these RtR laws sound great to me; I'm not arguing against them. I'm just bitching about dumb end-users who keep buying from companies that treat them poorly.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Wednesday March 08 2017, @09:51PM (1 child)
Fair enough, but at some point you will realize that with such a large population there are going to be enough uneducated / clueless people such that these business practices will always be a problem. Getting mad about human nature and other things we can't control is a pointless exercise that only hurts ourselves. Hence government intervention, but the responsibility falls back on "the people" to make sure the gov isn't going full nanny state.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 08 2017, @10:49PM
Sure, they'll be a problem, but I think it's a bit unfair to chalk everything stupid humans do up to "human nature". People can and do better. Lots of people do thorough research before buying a new car, for instance; there's all kinds of sources for information on this, from large publications like Consumer Reports and Motor Trend to various YouTube bloggers who do test drives and check-outs on a lift. There's really no shortage of product reviews out there for any mass-market item. Of course, farm equipment probably doesn't have so much of this, but I would think farmers would have their own groups, hopefully online, where they can exchange information about this stuff and badmouth companies that treat customers poorly.
The other big problem is that part of this problem is created by the government itself, in the form of the DMCA. Why should we need "government intervention" to solve a problem government created with a bad law? The government needs to fix the bad law. Of course, there's more to the RtR laws than that: they require access to diagnostic tools and manuals, which I think is a good idea and not something addressed by current laws. But the part about accessing the software is still limited by the DMCA it seems. Of course, the other big problem with government intervention is corruption: the government more often is working for big corporations and their lobbyists rather than the voters. How do we fix that? I'll honestly be surprised if any of these RtR laws actually get passed because of this factor. It would be great if they'd pass such laws in the EU though, because then we'd be able to get that information over here that way.