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Wired has published a long article about how the farming equipment manufacturer John Deere has just swindled farmers out of their right to repair their own equipment. Basically the manufacturer was allowed to write the agreement governing access to the firmware embedded in the farming equipment.
Farmers have been some of the strongest allies in the ongoing battle to make it easier for everyone to fix their electronics. This week, though, a powerful organization that's supposed to lobby on behalf of farmers in California has sold them out by reaching a watered-down agreement that will allow companies like John Deere to further cement their repair monopolies.
Farmers around the country have been hacking their way past the software locks that John Deere and other manufacturers put on tractors and other farm equipment, and the Farm Bureau lobbying organization has thus far been one of the most powerful to put its weight behind right to repair legislation, which would require manufacturers to sell repair parts, make diagnostic tools and repair information available to the public, and would require manufacturers to provide a way to get around proprietary software locks that are designed to prevent repair.
Motherboard also covered the topic about how farmer lobbyists sold out their farmers and helped enshrine John Deere's maintenance monopoly.
Earlier on SN:
The Right to Repair Battle Has Come to California (2018)
Apple, Verizon Join Forces to Lobby Against New York's 'Right to Repair' Law (2017)
US Copyright Office Says People Have the Right to Hack their Own Cars' Software (2015)
Jailbreak your Tractor or Make it Run OSS? (2015)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Pino P on Friday September 21 2018, @03:25PM (3 children)
The procedural problem with the Pirate Party in the United States is that the best-known planks of its platform are in areas where the Congress has preempted state governments, such as copyright and patent law. This sort of closes the opportunity for local Pirate Party organizations to gain influence at the local and several-state levels before expanding to a coordinated campaign to push the agenda federally.
Or what are good issues for a local Pirate Party organization to push?
(Score: 1) by TheCastro on Friday September 21 2018, @03:30PM
If you create states where the state won't enforce those federal rules they might as well not even exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @05:21PM
Municipal broadband, get rid of ref light cameras if they exist, stop using the police as funding and probably cut the size of the force, cut out unnecessary bureaucracy where it exists, and other stuff that sensible people would do if they were in local government.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @05:34PM
I'd vote for the Pirate Party candidates if they hadn't called themselves pirates, which certainly none if any of their potential voters are or ever will be.