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

wired.com

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

#161

Post by twobits »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #80
rimantas wrote: post #32

Why do you think that the very idea of ownership is so good?

The abstract answer: Legally enforceable protection for private property turns out to have some significant benefits for a society. It helps society develop past the warlord stage. The concrete answer: The article gives some ways that the John Deere idea is bad . In particular, a tractor isn't just a thing that I buy. It's a tool , and I need it to work so that I can plant and harvest my crops. This "ownership" quest…

"The article gives some ways that the John Deere idea is bad."

"Bad", is relative. "Bad" for whom? Deere or the farmer? Follow the money / power.

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

#162

Post by chacham15 »

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…

The real problem here isnt that we're leasing things (we have leases for cars, houses, and many other physical goods). The problem is that the manufacturers mix leasing and owning. I.e. you own the device, but lease the software. I think that everyone would be radically happier if you either leased everything or owned everything. This is partly because when we buy something at a store, we expect to own it, not own part of it and lease the rest. This leads to the price of the object being higher than what you would actually pay if you were going to only lease it. In a world where nobody owns tractors and just leases them, we would still be fine because nobody would pay full price for a tractor every month, but rather only what would make sense economically.

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

#163

Post by Thiz »

The only reasonable way to stop that is do not buy shit from them.

I had an HP printer that wouldn't run if the ink cartridge wasn't original HP, which are expensive as hell, so I dumped it and never bought HP again.

Now Epson is selling printers with refillable cartridges. Guess who's gonna get my money if I ever need a printer again?

Free market in action.

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

#164

Post by Nelson69 »

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 seems there is more backstory here that is missing from the article. Maybe a better question is, why don't all the auto companies, which already cooperate and "collude" on a lot of things, have similar licenses? There are little niche markets for modifying the software in cars, they even make movies about it. If there is some sort of financial protection to the manufacturer, I'd think they'd do similar things for certain cars, perhaps the ones that don't have performance enthusiasts, like minivans or something. I can think of some very real reasons where a company like Ford or Toyota would like to make sure you only use "sanctioned parts" for repairs and DRM could help them to verify that other parts aren't usable; they don't seem to be doing that though.

I'm just guessing here, but I know Deere produces some fairly sophisticated software that takes over head photos of crops and they have various services that offer advice on how to best farm different parts of a farmer's land. Some of that software interacts with their farm equipment (like it can signal the onboard software to maybe work more slowly in particularly dense parts of a crop and stuff like that.) I could see them trying to somehow protect that software investment and treat it as a lock-in where the device owners may want to use that service with other brands of equipment or something. From what I gather, it's a non-trivial amount of software that they've built that has some significant value.

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

#165

Post by aeturnum »

sker wrote: post #83
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…

What happens when we have computers implanted in our brains? Do I no longer own my brain?

"Metabolic control. Enhanced sensory perception. Improved reflexes and muscle capacity. Vastly increased data processing speed and capacity.

All improvements thanks to our cyber-brains and cyborg bodies. So what if we can't live without high-level maintenance? We have nothing to complain about. It doesn't mean we've sold our souls to Section 9.

We do have the right to resign if we choose. Provided we give the government back our cyborg shells and the memories they hold. "

- Ghost In The Shell (1995) Script

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

#166

Post by wosos »

api wrote: post #136
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 circu…

>(Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.)

I could go and lick the grass on my porch. I won't get paid for that. No matter how much I would like it.

Many things are just not profitable.

Unless you find other models, like patronizing

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

#167

Post by twobits »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #25
briantakita wrote: post #9

> John Deere may be out of touch, but it’s not alone. Other corporations, including trade groups representing nearly every major automaker, made the same case to the Copyright Office again and again. In Capitalism, the game is to make monetary profit & control the market, above all else. It makes sense what John Deere is doing. They are just being good Capitalists.

> the game is to make monetary profit & control the market What you describe, basically is monopolism. It is well known, that monopolies are killing a free market. > They are just being good Capitalists. When this is true, than something is very wrong with Capitalism itself.

"What you describe, basically is monopolism. It is well known, that monopolies are killing a free market."

Sure, but the problem is that unconstrained free markets lead to monopolies.

The big fish eats the smaller fish. The big fish becomes bigger and more difficult to attack. (New competition.) And so on, and so on, until there can be only one, or an oligopoly.

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

#169

Post by imglorp »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #112
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…

Why do they want to be a corn farmer? (Just curious. I don't know anything about the business of outdoor farming in Iowa.) It seems like you could make the mortgage if you can grow specialty crops - http://www.profitableplantsdigest.com/10-most-profitable-spe... Also, indoor growing is said to make certain crops grow 5x faster with 5x less resources. Here's one company that seems to be growing (they're opening a larg…

Aeroponics sounds interesting, but the fact is we have almost a billion acres of farmland. Maybe some distant day we'll convert that to 200 million acres of aeroponics facilities, but that seems unlikely.

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

#170

Post by Kluny »

MRSallee wrote: post #87
jimmytucson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sort of is. The Wired article mentions that some farmers are preferring to buy old tractors without the electronics. This demand increases the value for the used market and should depress the value of new tractors. There will likely be a growth in the business of maintaining old tractors and, potentially, enough public awareness of the benefits of tractors without electronics that another manufacturer can step in.…

Maybe tractor hacking will become a thing, too. I know lots of guys who circumvent the computers in their cars with pirated software, to make them racier. Might be a career in it for some of them.
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