Tag: right to repair

FTC finally investigates John Deere’s creepy repair restriction scheme

Deere caught in headlights — the US Federal Trade Commission is finally investigating farm equipment giant John Deere over its questionable repair policies. The company has made a habit of making it extremely difficult to outright impossible for its customers to repair the Deere products that they themselves own. This infringement on a customer’s right to repair is now being scrutinized by the guys in charge. Oh happy day!

Reuters reports that the probe “focuses on repair restrictions manufacturers place on hardware or software.” According to Reuters, Deere “signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation last year that would allow farmers to fix their equipment, or go to a third-party repair shop.” The investigation will examine whether Deere violated the Federal Trade Act’s section 5, which “prohibits unfair or deceptive practices affecting commerce.”

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How John Deere Hijacked Copyright Law To Keep You From Tinkering With Your Tractor

Discussions about the repairability of high-tech devices tend to focus on mass-market products: smartphones, laptops, video game consoles, and other commonplace devices. Less apparent is the repairability of tractors, cultivators, combines, and other heavy agricultural equipment that are equally reliant on computers and software. As with smartphone or laptop repairs, farmers and right-to-repair advocates have long complained that agricultural equipment manufacturers have used software to lock owners out of their products. To combat such restrictions, farmers and white-hat hackers have joined in an unlikely alliance to “liberate the tractors.”

As with other types of hardware, such as smart cars, the “techiness” of heavy agricultural machinery has become an impediment to meaningful ownership. Now, companies such as John Deere have vertically integrated the entire ecosystem for equipment, requiring customers to purchase repair services exclusively from dealers and using software to prevent independent repairs. 

Whenever software has been used to prevent the owners of products from altering or repairing their property, groups of ideologically driven individuals have used their skills to circumvent such constraints. Agricultural equipment is no different, and hackers have taken it upon themselves to “jailbreak” or open up the closed software systems that prevent independent repairs. In the words of one such hacker, “We want farmers to be able to repair their stuff for when things go wrong, and now that means being able to repair or make decisions about the software in their tractors.”

Hackers have now developed tools that would give power back to the owners of farm equipment, allowing farmers unversed in handling software to circumvent manufacturers’ software locks and independently make repairs and service their equipment. There’s only one problem with this movement to liberate the tractors: It’s a violation of federal copyright law.

Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), any individual who produces or uses a tool designed to circumvent software intended to keep them out of a system faces five years in federal prison and a fine of up to $500,000. Those penalties double for each subsequent infraction. This means software developers who build tools to get around John Deere’s software blocks could receive a 10-year prison sentence and a $1 million fine for each time they distribute their tool. Although the Copyright Office has implemented a narrow exception to the law for certain circumstances, a farmer who purchases such a tool could also end up in federal prison. 

The Copyright Office technically has the ability to implement broad, permanent exclusions to Section 1201 but has so far refused to act absent expressed congressional authorization. Fortunately, there are some in Congress that recognize this issue and have proposed solutions.

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Half the Country Is Now Considering Right to Repair Laws

The right-to-repair movement is poised to explode in 2021. When your stuff breaks, you should be able to fix it yourself. Tech manufactures want to control the methods of repair and companies such as Apple and John Deere do so at the detriment of their customers. But people across the world are tired of it and 25 states in the U.S. are considering right-to-repair legislation in 2021.

“Right to Repair is unstoppable and coming to a state near you. Lawmakers everywhere are seeing that Right to Repair is common sense: You buy a product, you own it, and you should be able to fix it,” Kerry Maeve Sheehan, the U.S. policy lead for the repair community iFixit, said in a press release. “With 25 states considering Right to Repair legislation in the U.S., it’s only a matter of time before Right to Repair is the law of the land.”

Right-to-repair is a problem bigger than Apple charging $300 to replace a cracked iPhone screen. Covid-19 put hospitals in a desperate situation. Patients needed ventilators to survive and there weren’t enough to go around. When one broke down, it often required a special technician to repair. Manufacturers made it impossible for hospital staff to do simple repairs to life saving equipment. The right-to-repair medical equipment is the subject of California’s SB 605 and Hawaii’s SB 760.

In other parts of the country, farmers are unable to till fields because their fancy new John Deere tractors won’t start until a technician clears out error codes in its software. John Deere promised it would provide the equipment and documentation farmers would need to make their own repairs by 2021. It lied. Now Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Vermont, South Carolina, and Missouri are looking to make the right-to-repair agricultural equipment the law of the land.

The pandemic made the world reliant on technology for work and human connection. As the lockdowns came, Apple shut down many of its repair centers and it became hard, if not impossible, for people to get simple repairs for this stuff. The independent repair business boomed, but the people trying to fix had to work around draconian systems built into machines meant to keep out anyone but the original manufacturer. “I was fixing people’s devices that were under warranty because these people couldn’t wait 4 to 8 weeks for Apple to fix their stuff,” 17-year old repair entrepreneur Sam Mencimer told Motherboard in February.

Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington state are all considering broad laws that would apply to most of the stuff we use everyday.

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