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John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

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Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#171

Post by dspillett »

dataflow wrote: post #95
cgyvbunji wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think if he did that people wouldn't pay attention. My experience is that when you complain to people about digital rights they just glaze over unless you walk them through all the ins and outs and the implications.

I share his videos here but nobody seems to see them and/or care enough to vote; all I get is crickets. It's baffling to me. Examples: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48802162 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395520 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043208

Video content, particularly on youtube, gets very little traction here generally.

I watch his videos, but not from links here and that is probably what you are seeing: those of us who might follow your link have already seen the video (likely via grayjay rather than youtube) and will skip over it to the next interesting new thing. People who don't already watch him will see “[video] (youtube.com), 1 point, discuss” and think “oh, another video that could be a few paragraphs of text which would be much faster to read than watch, that so far no one else has seen as worth interacting with, preceded by two unskippable adverts”.

A link to youtube is only going to get much attention if it is lucky to have a title that jumps out to a few people so it gains the first few votes and/or comments that get the ball rolling. Even then Louis' videos aren't going to get a hot debate going: most people either entirely agree so don't see the point commenting further, or they aren't the sort of people who are reading HN at all or are but don't follow video links.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#172

Post by izacus »

SideQuark wrote: post #59
syntaxing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I went through some data and John Deere makes 5B NET profit for the worse years. 10B for their best (only looking back 10 years). I wouldn’t be surprised these anticompetitive (as in anti “consumer”) has netted them north of 10B.

Last year was 5b net profit on 44b revenue. Attributing more than a tiny fraction of profit to the right to repair stuff is wild dreams, given the amount of physical goods they sell. Nothing in their SEC filings shows anything mentionable about such claims. It does break out actual profit by company sectors.

John Deere itself went far to prevent repairs and fought tooth and nail against it in the court - why would they spend so much effort on something that's not profitable?

The corporation you're defending is disproving your point by their own actions.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#173

Post by izacus »

dreambuffer wrote: post #15

There's a cognitive dissonance on this site where everyone claims to hate this attempt at regulatory capture, yet they would do it too if it was their tech company and call it a "moat", and many are actively working towards that.

Just because someone wrote a post on a site with orange banner it doesn't mean they agree with other people that wrote posts on the site with the orange banner.

Let's learn the concept of "different people have different opinions", shall we?

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#174

Post by tialaramex »

doginasuit wrote: post #33

The very concept of IP was a mistake. I understand it helped make a lot of work possible. But virtually nothing useful came from nothing, and the reservoir of human knowledge belongs to all of us. Unless you are Isaac Newton, you took a good idea and made it better or more applicable. Pretending like you own it is just dishonest. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. --Isaac Newton

Intellectual property is a broad swathe of different rights and they each have some merits and are worth considering separately.

The trademarks and the protected designations I believe help consumers to know what they're getting and protect makers against competition with inferior products which are superficially similar. So that's things like "Coke" is definitely Coca-Cola's product and not just whatever brown liquid the seller could get cheapest, British Beef isn't actually from America just relabelled for a higher price. Champagne isn't actually a sparkling wine made in California. You can buy cheap brown liquid, Californian Sparkling wine and American beef, but it's right for consumers to know what they're getting and for the vintners in Champagne to know some Tech bro's side venture Californian winery isn't shipping bogus "Champagne" made in the Napa valley that will compete with their genuine product on store shelves in London. If consumers want to drink sparkling Californian wine they can do that, there's no need to use the name Champagne worked so hard for.

The patents are most reprehensible. There the deal is the government gives you a (surprisingly long) exclusive right to make a thing, and in exchange you give up some information about how to make it. Lawyers have managed to finagle providing almost no useful information about "how" in exchange for these quite unreasonable exclusive rights, that needs at least substantial rebalancing. In software it's just bullshit and should go entirely, in pharmaceuticals you can argue about the exact rules more.

Copyright is the most interesting tension. In theory Copyright protects creators - and that seems great. In practice this unavoidably also benefits non-creator heirs "Knives Out" style but that's not really the worst thing in the world. It also though benefits publishers which are corporate entities and that makes no sense whatsoever in the modern era. That needs drastic reining in, if while we're in there we can ensure that the author's grandkids don't get a free ride for life just because grandma wrote this amazing book that'd be nice. Copyright expansion seems to have slowed or stopped during my lifetime, which is good, but it needs reversing.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#175

Post by lotsofpulp »

dataflow wrote: post #95
cgyvbunji wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think if he did that people wouldn't pay attention. My experience is that when you complain to people about digital rights they just glaze over unless you walk them through all the ins and outs and the implications.

I share his videos here but nobody seems to see them and/or care enough to vote; all I get is crickets. It's baffling to me. Examples: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48802162 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395520 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043208

Unless the video is about an extraordinary natural phenomenon that can be seen, video (and audio) is strictly inferior to text for communicating information.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#176

Post by nicce »

SideQuark wrote: post #59
syntaxing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I went through some data and John Deere makes 5B NET profit for the worse years. 10B for their best (only looking back 10 years). I wouldn’t be surprised these anticompetitive (as in anti “consumer”) has netted them north of 10B.

Last year was 5b net profit on 44b revenue. Attributing more than a tiny fraction of profit to the right to repair stuff is wild dreams, given the amount of physical goods they sell. Nothing in their SEC filings shows anything mentionable about such claims. It does break out actual profit by company sectors.

Do they mention about how much revenue comes from selling parts and maintenance? That is what is directly impacted.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#177

Post by darkwater »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #97
dataflow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share his videos here but nobody seems to see them and/or care enough to vote; all I get is crickets. It's baffling to me. Examples: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48802162 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395520 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043208

HN audience prefers text to video; videos rarely do well here compared to other sites.

But still, there are many many HNers who binge watch YT videos all the time, and share it here, or suggest YT videos as "dive deeper" links on many topics.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#178

Post by izacus »

VorpalWay wrote: post #157
parineum wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine, for example, needing to pay $1000 to replace an oil filter because you needed to buy the official John Deere oil filter and have the John Deere technician drive out to install it and flash the tractor to start up with the new filter. >That's what John Deere was up to. Is that an actual price and the actual process?

Even in other industries it is common that spare parts and consumables have a very high margin (while the initial purchase has a much smaller margin or in some cases is even subsidised). The most well known example is probably printer ink/toner. (Razors is another often quoted example.) But this applies to car parts too. I needed a new small plastic clip to my Dacia. I was quoted 100 SEK (about 10 USD) for that. I 3D…

It's also absolutely no secret that fattest margins and profits for automobile industry is also made with "aftermarket service" - which include upsales and inflated prices for service intervals.

There's a reason they all now need digital service books which are locked to their partnerships.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#179

Post by bluesign »

sobani wrote: post #132
dreambuffer wrote: post #15

There's a cognitive dissonance on this site where everyone claims to hate this attempt at regulatory capture, yet they would do it too if it was their tech company and call it a "moat", and many are actively working towards that.

You might be a victim of the Goomba Fallacy[0] where you're seeing two opposing opinions from two distinct groups of people, but since those are expressed on the same site, it seems as if 'the site' is contradicting itself. [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-goomb...

Doesn't Goomba fallacy require at least one opinion should be minority?

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#180

Post by jve »

shuwix wrote: post #167
jve wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may very well be because of process too. I don't like people calling out soldered stuff. By the way, soldered stuff may still be serviceable at 3rd party service centers, just not at every DIYers home. It will cost you quite some money, yeah. There are laptops that have soldered RAM + Free slot for upgrade. But regulating that stuff is just stupid I think - there is a valid reason for manufacturers to try make thi…

Slots arw for upgrades, repair and salvage. Almost no nowadays notebooks with soldered RAM have additional slot. What of RAM takes 2 secocds with slot. Soldering lots of pins or reballing requires specialized equipment and skilled (and expensive) person. I'm going to scrap 120 almost mint condition 8th gen i5 Thinkpads thanx to 8GB soldered RAM, which is no longer enough for efficient office work on W11 + basic corpo…

What does it mean - scrap? Are you going to sell them? For how much?
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