We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership • Hacker News Board

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#131

Post by fennecfoxen » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:14 PM UTC

cbd1984 wrote: post #106

briantakita wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yields are pretty high. Though there are many products. So you won't necessarily have high yielding corn, but you will overall have more food & materials. The fruits tend to be more of a mixed bag that is best distributed & consumed locally. > What would doing that for all food do to the price of food? Note that conventional petrol agriculture is heavily subsidized. Removing the subsidy will increase the price of foo…

> Removing the subsidy will increase the price of food. Then it would be wrong to do remove that subsidy. Poor people need to eat, too.

If you want to help poor people eat, you should give poor people money to help them eat, rather than paying farmers to make one specific type of farming easier and distorting the market to artificially favor something that's actually less efficient (and may have all sorts of crazy side effects on the rest of the world).

Favoring direct intervention to fix the actual problem should be axiomatic, really.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#132

Post by notahacker » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #18

Well that's fine. You license me the tractor for $X per month and let me cancel that license and return it on a reasonable period of notice, and you have a deal. If you're going to license things, you can sell licenses, but if you're going to sell an object, I own the object.

I'm not sure that legal innovation obliging people to pay monthly for everything that comes with a EULA is really the most consumer-friendly way forward here...

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#133

Post by brudgers » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

cylinder wrote: post #68

brudgers wrote: post #50

[IANAL] The big play isn't about ownership. It's about liability. If you own the tractor and something bad happens, it's product liability. Our intuitions of responsibility go back to the Code of Hammurabi. If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. If you license the tractor, well that'…

Ownership vs license doesn't really have much to do with negligence/torts

[IANAL]

It does in regard to who can have standing. A license can prohibit transfer to a third party by the purchaser.

A license also moves what is provided from product toward service and consequently from defects toward errors and omissions.

The applicable case law is different. The applicable statutes are different. People can't usually sue Microsoft every time Windows crashes.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#134

Post by hharnisch » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

hharnisch wrote: post #117

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iowan here. There are almost no family farms left at all. My neighbor would desperately like to be a farmer. But the scrubby 40-acre field across from his house just sold for $400,000. He'd get maybe 120 bushels of corn off of it. Current price per bushel: $3.80. So $456 income per acre == $18,240 per year. That's half the mortgate payments. Not to mention the cost of working the field. So a lost cause. The 13 farmer…

Which town? I'd imagine this is pretty common in places near Des Moines/Cedar Rapids suburb type towns. My observations come from living in Blakesburg, IA -- town of 400 people.

Small world Joe, I'm a Hawkeye. Go Hawks!

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#135

Post by Bouncingsoul1 » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

I wonder what we would found if we got a look into the source of these systems. As far as I know BMW's software heavily depends on Free/Open Source Software and for the other'S since we are in the embeded enviroment I could imagine the same. Would make my day if these companies would suddenly get the tables turned and instead of Copyright it would be a Copyleft issue.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#136

Post by api » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:17 PM UTC

apricot wrote: post #48

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights. As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them. When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms. I remember reading Stallman's sh…

This is getting meta and no longer directly responsive to the article, which I don't wholly disagree with. A tractor and a book are different situations.

Books are hard to copy, while files are easy to copy. Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them... even while they will pay the same for a fancy cup of coffee. Hence a scramble for some way to set up a toll booth that is hard to circumvent... DRM, streaming, proprietary reading platforms like Kindle, etc.

Stallman is absolutely right and was a visionary for seeing this when he did, but he doesn't get the full breadth of the problem. In his world, the creators of things starve. People can't have freedom because they want "free," which means slavery for the producers of content. (Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.) Stallman can ignore this side of the equation because he is a tenured academic. It doesn't matter to him that nobody pays for his work.

What we need is some kind of open digital rights tracking system that does not rely on hardware locks and that lets certain bits of information behave like physical objects with physical characteristics. It's a hard problem, but hard problems get solved. I used to think cryptocurrency was impractical in practice. Maybe something can be done with homomorphic encryption. Too bad nobody is working on this because everyone still thinks we can make everything "free" and (magic happens here) and the creators of things can somehow still eat.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#137

Post by 6stringmerc » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:17 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #58

6stringmerc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, due to the notion that is being put forward that the reason for this distinction is for safety then all maintenance liabilities for the life-span of the vehicle should rest with the manufacturer. That means all fluids, wipers, brake pads, tires, emissions equipment...I'd like to see that condition tacked on.

Triple Net leases in real estate are an example of well established precedent contrary to the belief you are expressing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_net_lease

Okay, but when's the last time a piece of real estate ran over a child? I'm being a bit drastic, sure, but we're talking about a mobile, several thousand pound object. As your link shows, the notion of casaulty with respect to liability still engages the owner / lessor with obligations with respect to legal standards. The NNN lease may exist, but it's not a very palatable notion, IMO, especially when applied to something like a vehicle.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#138

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:18 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #27

Loughla wrote: post #12

The people who have the money to buy the mega-tractors you see in the article don't care. That's why, unless someone outside the industry makes a stink, nothing will happen. These are giga-corporations who are 'family owned' in name only. If they don't rent, they operate that machine for a few years, play the tax game, and trade it even-money for a new one. To them, ownership doesn't matter. Their service contracts w…

Lots of family farms own tractors worth more than $200K, and combines worth more than $500K. They're paying significant interest to the bank for the privilege, but owning equipment that can cover twice the land in a day is a lot cheaper than buying and maintaining two smaller tractors (and accompaning accessories) and hiring a farmhand.

>but owning equipment that can cover twice the land in a day is a lot cheaper

It can make the difference between a successful harvest or not; but neither strategy is a guarantee. As an example, if you have your cotton defoliated and then your harvester goes on strike for two or more days, any rain in the interim will destroy your crop.

Hiring a farmhand is cheap. Really, they work for almost nothing. But; the ones who know how to run the equipment are busy at harvest time.

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#139

Post by vfrogger » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

I noticed a different flavor of this same logic with edited DVD's back in the 2000's. In Utah, there was a thriving edited DVD rental business during this time. Essentially, Mom and Pop shops would buy a DVD, take out the sex, language, and violence, and rent the edited version.

Hollywood complained that these companies were illegally making copies, so the mom and pop rental stores started to include the original copy as well with the edited copy, to prove that they were not making illegal copies.

Ultimately, all of these companies were put out of business because the courts ruled that just because you bought a DVD, you don't have the rights to modify it because it causes "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies". I find it interesting that the issue was harming the creative artistic expression, not financial at all, since, they were not pirating the films, so in truth, Hollywood was selling more DVD's since people who wouldn't normally watch a movie with 75 f-words in it, might actually watch the edited version.

Of course, in today's world, there's not many products that we can buy that did not have artistic expression involved in building that product. My house was artistically designed by an architect, if I don't like the kitchen, would I offend his artistic expression by remodeling? My phone was definitely "designed", but maybe I don't like showing off the apple logo on the back, so I put a cover on it, am I offending the artistic expression? If I'm not able to modify a product, do I really own it at all?

Re: We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Idea of Ownership

#140

Post by bsbechtel » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 4:23 PM UTC

jimmytucson wrote: post #59

sologoub wrote: post #35

An earlier article did a much better job layout why this is a huge problem for independent farmers: "The family farmer who owns this tractor is a friend of mine. He just wanted a better way to fix a minor hydraulic sensor. Every time the sensor blew, the onboard computer would shut the tractor down. It takes a technician at least two days to order the part, get out to the farm, and swap out the sensor. So for two day…

Why doesn't the market handle this? If John Deere is only willing to sell lifetime licenses to operate their vehicles, thus putting the farmer at risk in ways like you described, why do farmers still buy these "licenses"? Naively, they must represent some advantage (despite their shortcomings), otherwise John Deere wouldn't be able to sell these things.

It most likely will, but it takes time. Product cycles for ag equipment are similar to the auto industry - new models every year, but major model overhauls every 4-5 years. That means it'll really take 10-15 years before the market really adapts to the demands of the customer. This technology is only a few years old.