Alabama farmer sues John Deere for ‘right to repair’

This sounds similar to the contrast between older and newer cars too; the older ones were designed to last with periodic scheduled maintenance, whereas newer ones are designed to have no maintenance for their "design life", after which it's difficult to repair.

But step back - how is any of that morally right? Why should people have to fight corporation in court to get a basic right to repair the thing they bought? Its insane!

Surely, if there was any sense to this, the presumption would be in favour of the purchaser by default! Regardless of any service contract or other legal agreement. That it should be for the corporation to argue in court that there are some special circumstances that mean that default ruling does not apply, even though you bought (not rented) their product.

The fact it is this way round tells you all you need to know. At best, the consumer can waste time (10 years?) and money (lots) to hopefully (but perhaps not) prove the obvious case. OTOH, there is no incentive for the corporation not to try the dirtiest most unfriendly tactics they think they can get away with. Esp. if they have a near monopoly in their domain (eg John Deere).

For this reason and others, I see governance and law as captured entities - they are captured by corporations and we the consumers are there to have our wealth extracted from while retaining very few rights. Frankly, it is neo-feudalism. Or fascism (corporate+government together).

https://www.biren.com/blog/2020/september/defective-machiner...

In particular https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1200/1245...

> The [misuse/ [or] modification] was so highly extraordinary that it was not reasonably foreseeable to [name of defendant], and therefore should be considered as the sole cause of [name of plaintiff]’s harm.

So, if it was foreseeable that a 3rd party may modify some equipment in some way, the manufacturer must specifically warn the purchaser about "don't do that."

With software, this becomes a much more difficult challenge.

Additionally, https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1200/1244...

> [Name of defendant] claims that [he/she/nonbinary pronoun/it] is notresponsible for any harm to [name of plaintiff] based on a failure to warn because [name of plaintiff] is a sophisticated user of the [product]. To succeed on this defense, [name of defendant] must prove that, at the time of the injury, [name of plaintiff], because of [his/her/nonbinary pronoun]particular position, training, experience, knowledge, or skill, knew or should have known of the [product]’s risk, harm, or danger.

So with software, either the user is a sophisticated user and aware of the implications of installing their own patches on the system and what that could do (over fertilize a field because of an incorrect setting on the gps calibration)... or they aren't. If they aren't a sophisticated user of the system, then it should be locked down sufficiently to prevent those changes.

> “The sophisticated user defense concerns warnings. Sophisticated users ‘arecharged with knowing the particular product’s dangers.’ ‘The rationale supporting the defense is that “the failure to provide warnings about risks already known to a sophisticated purchaser usually is not a proximate cause of harm resulting from those risks suffered by the buyer’s employees or downstream purchasers.”

So are we expecting farmers to be software engineers too?

The EPA also doesn't like the idea of people making things not pass emissions.