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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @04:45AM
Louis Rossmann will be speaking in support of the bill at the hearing and has brought a camera person and gear to live stream the event on Youtube. This isn't just about farm equipment, the right to repair could make OEM batteries and parts available to consumers and provide repair shops with schematics and materials needed to do board repair on failed devices. Properly repaired devices are good for the economy (jobs), consumers (alternative to buying new), and lessen the amount of otherwise repairable electronics sitting in landfills. Rossmann has an excellent Youtube channel featuring hundreds of hours of board repair content, electronics tutorials, micro-soldering, and commentary on the right to repair movement.
https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos [youtube.com]