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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.
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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @10:00PM
>> Although if John Deere is making these claims I guess the old Johnny Poppers will just go up in value since you can outright own them.
I believe that is and probably has been happening for some time already.
I visited my brother who runs the family farm just last week. We drove past a John Deere dealership where we have done business for decades. My brother commented that there were only a couple of used tractors on the lot where I could remember growing up that they had (typically) a dozen or two at any given time.
He commented that the reason was that the newer ones were so complicated and expensive with electrically controlled hydraulic systems where the older one were controlled with mechanical linkages. People were keeping their older tractors because they were easier and cheaper to maintain.