The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair

That said, I think John Deere is just the asshole willing to weaponize the legal system to enforce their dreams. The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system. I'm not saying we should just delete all those, but they are in bad need of reform and enable a tremendous amount of abuse. The abuse is only going to get worse unless we treat the cause(s) rather than just the symptoms.

I'm glad the feds are giving John Deere some attention, but I really hope they are going to fix the lopsided system instead of just try to bully or micro-regulate John Deere into "voluntarily" allowing more repair. If we stopped unleashing the lawyers on people for modifying or interfacing with devices they purchased, it would shift the balance of power more toward the center (whereas currently the power is almost entirely on the side of the companies).

Even if you have no interest in repairing or "tinkering" with your own stuff, you should be on the side of right to repair.

I’ve always though of them as business owners with special skills in growing things, auto mechanics, and logistics.

You've never met a farmer. Admittedly no one in my family is a farmer, but half of them are loggers, diesel mechanics, or heavy equipment operators. Most of them are ridiculously intelligent and able to fix anything that moves.

That is A problem, but that is not the problem seen here. The problem here is trade secrets. Specifically electronic secrets that prevent third parties from fully servicing their own equipment. Like HP inkjet electronic restrictions that prevent people from refilling their own ink cartridges. This is still a problem without patent law, without copyright law, and without lawyers.

eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626534

system created to protect inventors and authors from being abused by more powerful people(investors, corporations, publishers) is actually used to abuse everyone except powerful groups then yeah - it is a horrible system that needs to go.

Or just consider animal husbandry at its roots, OG bio hacking...

We have a number of things that sniff the traffic for important implement data and state and Deere is going to lock it all up. You'll be left with minimal data on the J1939 connector like the automakers did with OBD2.

it's not a hard guess even if you don't share the opinion ; nearly every movie where 'farmer' is a plot point demonstrates a rural-living poorly educated family living in dust-bowl conditions and barely scraping enough resource by to feed the animals.

grapes of wrath, wizard of oz, of mice and men, o brother where art thou, ballad of buster scruggs -- yes it's a stereotype , but it's a common one in movies and literature.

It wouldn't be the worst thing. 20 years for a patent may have been sensible a century ago but these days it's almost absurd.

Farmers have long used bio engineering to make crops tastier or more resistant to disease or drought.

I even saw a conversation on here a few months back where someone on here not-so-nicely corrected a user that the big industrial farmers are smart but the rest of them are backwoods hicks that barely know what electricity is.

https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/

They also have a 3d printer, a microhouse, a CEB press, and a power cube

https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/

It still seems surprising to me that this idea can survive more than five seconds of thought. Farmers own tracts of land, lots of equipment, and have to navigate the market for their product, financing, capital allocation, weather patterns, all sorts of random events. They frequently have dozens of employees, and constantly have to negotiate with those, and with customers, and with vendors.

All of this is in addition to the actual growing of crops.

It seems like the most natural thing in the world that this type of person won't take kindly to being dictated to by John Deere (doesn't mean it doesn't happen anyway) and would try their hand at a bit of hacking if needs must.

The Monsanto stigma is well-earned by its legal teams, much to the chagrin of its many Monsanto biochem employees that saw (and see) the company as a creator of good in the world.

People that don't understand this think that the production of GMO crops is done by scientists gene splicing scary chemicals into food products.

What is actually done is scientist get a genetic profile of crops, look for genes in crops that behave in a way they like, and bread crops with those genes. Exactly what "natural breeding" does, except for maybe the fact that it can be far more targeted with the genetic information.

There is a downside to this, it often results in highly homogeneous genetics in plants. However, that's a problem we already have with "natural" processes (see: bananas and most citrus fruits).

Usually. Not this time around, though. You can't call yourself a "reasonable person" and vote for the people behind https://i.imgur.com/WQ4qbfj.png .

Sorry. You just can't.

"I've been voting XXX all of my life, and my state has been ruled by XXX over the last 20 years, and the life is still shitty. It's totally a failure of YYY, they want to destroy America"

I see you’ve never met a farmer. The exact opposite of what you claim is reality.

Farmers are highly technical and have come up with plenty of ingenious solutions to problems on their farms, any labor saving device they can dream up can save them lots of time and money. Repairing equipment quickly is an important skill to have when something shits out during harvest, the weather isn’t going to wait..

A farmer can work miracles with a welder, hammer, wrench, and pliers since they’re generally put in the middle of nowhere and need to keep equipment operational.

Could you share a link to that full PDF? I assume it's from the recently published documents from Smith?

Edit: Found it! https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25238371-chutkan-ord...

Too much money and private interest here.

I spent a summer working on a 3rd generation family farm, and it was one of the most technically competent workplaces I’ve ever seen. The owner had a degree in agricultural engineering, and dozens of patents from farming equipment he initially invented for his own use. Much of the equipment they used day to day was designed and built on site and they had a full machine shop, electrical shop, etc. Modern equipment like combines are so complex, automation heavy, and unreliable that they are usually operated by master mechanics that also weld, code, and are otherwise primarily technical people. When those multi-million dollar machines break- which happens daily- they are losing money fast and need to fix it immediately, right there in the field.

The idea of farmers as uneducated non-technical people is an ignorant stereotype held by urban people that have no clue what farms are really like.

GMO is different. It involves the laboratory isolation of genes, and techniques to introduce said genes into an organism such that its DNA is altered. These technique do include gene splicing.

Golden rice is one well known example. It is a GMO plant which has been modified with genes taken from daffodils and a bacteria called erwinium uredovora. It's not just breeding existing species for good qualities.

To the topic in question, Republicans want to abolish most regulations (see: Project 2025). And so far the only states to pass right-to-repair laws are Democraticly-controlled (NY, MN, CA, OR, CO).

In any case there are other venues where this type of conversation is better held.

I pointed out that futures trading was literally invented by farmers.

What a stupid thing to say. Not only do you not know anything about me (I am myself a small-time/part-time farmer, and my neighbors are all farmers. My 14 acres is the smallest lot in my area. My neighbor/friend across the street farms 80 acres and sells his crops as some of the highest quality produce to top buyers. I also grew up with farmers as family members and friends. I think I've probably met a farmer before), but you clearly didn't even read my comment before replying to it or you would know that you're opening salvo is quite wrong. A quote from my comment that you replied to:

> Some of the farmers I've talked to understand the importance (sic) ownership and right to repair better than even many engineers.

It seems to me that logically, it's hard to have talked to people, while simultaneously having never met them.

After such a sloppy and unnecessarily assumptive (and incorrectly assumptive) response, it's hard to give any credibility whatsoever to anything else you say. I agree with it, but (as many of us rural livers/farmers) like to say, "even a stopped clock is right twice a day".

Also, I never said they aren't intelligent or able to fix anything that moves. If something I said suggested they weren't intelligent or capable, please point it out to me. Such a thing would be absurd - all the farmers I know are quite handy and can fix just about anything (that big corporations don't actively engineer to prevent, hence the hullaballoo over right-to-repair).

What I said was that they don't usually care about political fights like right-to-repair. And I stand by that, many of them don't. It's not a direct relation with intelligence level or handiness, it's more about personality and individual interests. Most of them just think John Deere are assholes but have no idea about the right-to-repair movement. They don't realize how deep the poison goes. More and more are getting into it, but it's still pretty unusual.

It's a free-ish country so you can do as you please, but I would recommend that you read and think a little more carefully before replying to people, especially when you're going to insult them by loudly proclaiming that they are an ignorant liar like you did to me.

It would probably be easier to describe where one would not get this stereotype. Pretty much every city person (which as many sibling comments have pointed out, control essentially all media and pop culture) holds and perpetuates that stereotype.

Pretty much only people who are or know farmers know the reality behind it.

But I do think it's important to point out that farmers are a very diverse group, just like many other professions. There are geniuses and there are morons. You can't take a sample size of n <= 5 and extrapolate characteristics of millions of people.

So it's difficult to know that these people don't care about Trump at all and think he is just as ridiculous as you do. They just hate the Democrats so much that they will do anything they can to stop them. The reasons are numerous and valid, btw.

More evidence that people really shouldn't trust their first, shallow reactions to things. You know nothing about me and yet have jumped to an absurdly wrong conclusion, ironically while trying to correct what you think was an incorrect conclusion of mine. For more information, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887807

> The exact opposite of what you claim is reality.

Please read it a little closer. I'm not claiming any such thing. I'm pointing out that it is a popular conception - and it is. That the popular conception is wrong does not mean it isn't a popular conception. That's quite the logic error. And for someone to point out a popular conception does not mean they agree with it, and even if they did, it certainly does not mean they've never met a farmer (lol). This has so many fallacies in it, it's actually funny.