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posted by CoolHand on Friday April 24 2015, @05:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-mine-is-yours dept.

Wired has an article which responds to the view of John Deere and General Motors on what the people who buy their vehicles actually own, which was expressed during comments on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):

John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.

Several manufacturers recently submitted similar comments to the Copyright Office under an inquiry into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
...
General Motors told the Copyright Office that proponents of copyright reform mistakenly “conflate ownership of a vehicle with ownership of the underlying computer software in a vehicle.” But I’d bet most Americans make the same conflation—and Joe Sixpack might be surprised to learn GM owns a giant chunk of the Chevy sitting in his driveway

Also covered by Techdirt.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @06:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @06:27PM (#174789)

    It's not that they don't want you to fix it yourself, it's that if you get into messing with things on the software-level, you will be making possibly dangerous changes to real time operating system code; more importantly to them, within that code there are numerous proprietary stacks like J1939 or ISOBUS which the industries really doesn't want you to see or analyze without licenses costing on the order of thousands of dollars.
    Stop complaining, you really don't want to F with the software in a Deere, it's not worth your time. Here, you should rely on a mfg guarantee to keep it functioning. If you don't like that, then buy analogue or machines that are open + repairable. You don't expect to be able to mess with firmware in that apple computer laptop, do you? No, you get a PC instead.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:08AM (#174922)

    Stop complaining, you really don't want to F with the software in a Deere, it's not worth your time.

    How could you possibly know this? Especially the "what I want" part? My plan is to install WiFi on the tractor, so I can control the darn thing from the bar down the road. What could go wrong?