Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Right to Repair

posted by on Wednesday March 08 2017, @05:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the protecting-us-from-ourselves dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Right to Repair | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 67 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @01:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @01:29AM (#476817)

    An auto dealer isn't going to let you take a car off the lot, take it home, and take it apart before buying it so that you can fully evaluate its build quality and engineering, for instance.

    Well, yes, but I fully expect that once I have bought and paid for the car that I can do whatever the hell I want with it, including taking it apart piece by piece, for whatever reason. What business is it to the auto dealer what I do with my own property? Of course, I also think that the manufacturer has every right to say that the warranty is void if I do decide to take the car apart and put it back together if I am not a car mechanic certified to work on their cars.

    I don't support consumers getting screwed over by things they couldn't have reasonably known about, but I do support them getting screwed over because they ignored plainly-obvious warnings (e.g., "this product can only be repaired by the manufacturer, whenever they feel like it, wherever they decide to do it (even if there's only one location in your entire state), and at whatever price they decide to set").

    IANAL but I suspect that such a contract clause would not pass muster in a court of law. Have we got any legal scholars who would care to weigh in on this? I'm interested to see what a real contract lawyer might make of this.