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

#171

Post by twobits » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:01 PM UTC

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #91

briantakita wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is well known, that monopolies are killing a free market. In ecology, there's a concept call Ecological Succession. Likewise, in Capitalism, the free market is a stage in a succession toward monopoly. Capital tends to pool, leading to monopolies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession

Applying concepts from one scientific discipline to other disciplines does seldom fit. I think it is more a sign of pseudo-scientific trickery to back the own thinking, that is most often used in unsound economical theories. It is a fact, that while monopolies are good for the monopolists, it is bad for societies at large. And no "ecological" concepts can convince me from the opposite. One example: While bigger banks…

"It is a fact, that while monopolies are good for the monopolists, it is bad for societies at large."

And you are correct. But something different was being said: Unconstrained capitalism, leads to monopolies (or oligopolies). And that's true too. Read your own words. "monopolies are good for the monopolists". Isn't that another way to say "shareholders' profit"? There you have motive. And in a pond of fish, doesn't the bigger, eat the smaller, becoming even more big in the process? That's the process.

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

#172

Post by randomdata » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #62

hharnisch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. The family owned farmers care too. For the big equipment, like combines, there's a handful of people everyone pays to have their fields harvested. This person get's compensation in the form of money and other services (someone else will plow their field for instance). People own their own tractors and share time to get things done, otherwise you'd have to own all of the equipment (which is only justified wh…

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…

There is only one farm on my road that doesn't have the next generation poised to take or already has been taken over by the operation, and even in that case I believe there is interest from the grandchildren. From my anecdotal experience, the future of family farms looks fairly bright.

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

#173

Post by declan » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:03 PM UTC

The linked article is good as far as it goes, but it fails to take the next logical step and call for the simple repeal of the anti-circumvention section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today. It was sold to Congress as a non-controversial way to implement a pair of (yawn) WIPO Copyright Treaties. The DMCA was approved unanimously in the Senate and by a process reserved for non-controversial legislation in the House; there was not even a recorded vote.

This is federal law as buggy and outdated code, which is badly in need of refactoring. I wrote about a proposed law to defang the DMCA back in 2003, once some of the 1201 problems became clear: http://news.cnet.com/Congress-mulls-revisions-to-DMCA/2100-1... But because of the influence of the copyright lobby, no amendments have ever succeeded.

I wrote more about a better way to approach 1201 and, more broadly, federal DRM policy in this law review article here: http://mccullagh.org/misc/articles/michigan.state.drm.0605.p...

While letting people know about John Deere's comments to the Copyright Office is great, the only reason the Copyright Office has a role here is that 1201 authorizes them to set exemptions. But why should we have to beg the Feds for exemptions when the underlying logic of 1201 is suspect?

At the very least 1201 deserves to be debated in Congress with an understanding of what it actually does and how it affects modern technology. When it was introduced 18 years ago, nobody could have known, and that debate has never happened.

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

#174

Post by hn_ » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:03 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.

Government subsidies corn which is then used to make cheap high fructose corn syrup. Subsidies only go to a handful of crops.

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

#175

Post by praneshp » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

6stringmerc wrote: post #137

brudgers wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somet…

A running over a child equivalent would be falling down unexpectedly or a small portion caving in.

When I was 7, all the bricks in one corner of the kitchen fell down. Just randomly (probably decaying, but unnoticed because of the paint) The lady taking care of me was less than 5 feet away.

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

#176

Post by ploxiln » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

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…

Many people who try to make a living making music or writing are unable to do so, even if the music or the writing is pretty good, and that's due to obscurity, not piracy. Historically, even fewer people were able to.

Pages and even chapters of books have been copied by photocopiers (found in many libraries!) for decades. The only limit to the copying was how many quarters you had.

You need to give up the idea that people need to get paid for the stuff they get paid for today, that everyone who makes money doing something today, needs to make at least that much on the same thing in the future.

People will have to do whatever they can get paid for, which is the case for most people today anyway. Creators won't starve, they'll create less and have a real job.

You think the problem of "creators starving" is so bad it justifies anything and everything needed to prevent it. I don't.

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

#177

Post by hn_ » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

cbd1984 wrote: post #142

fennecfoxen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you want to help poor people eat, you should give poor people money to help them eat The more food we can make per unit resource, the more food we have, given that resources are finite. Giving the poor more money does nothing to change that.

What?

Subsidies (as they are practiced now) encourage non-sustainable and wasteful food production.

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

#178

Post by twobits » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

allannienhuis wrote: post #122

dto-games wrote: post #21

The way to end this nonsense is to write and distribute a worm that bricks every single iDevice on Earth.

No, the way to end it is to build an alternative that is better in the eyes of the people willing to pay money for the devices. Spend your energy on building something rather than tearing down.

In that case, there would never have been war.

What you say, is the "correct" solution. The good, the improving, what helps society. I agree with you. But it's slow, fragile, and you should acknowledge that your established, strong, opposition, may play dirty.

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

#179

Post by sliverstorm » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #149

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…

One wonders how the corporations farm them. The situation you describe doesn't sound like it would be any more economically feasible for them to work than your neighbor. (Hm. Random calculation: 120 bushels of corn at 56 lbs per bushel, per acre, is about 11 metric tons per hectare[1]. According to the FDA[2], the US average projected production for 2014/2015 is 10.7 metric tons (the world average is about half that)…

Mega corporations have economies of scale on their side for production costs, and likely much better interest rates on the land. So they can farm the land for cheaper, and the cost of the land on a per-annus basis is cheaper too.

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

#180

Post by nnf » Tue, Apr 21, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

Is this really the will of John Deere, or just that of its corporate lawyers coming up with something new to justify their own continued employment?

This is not a defense of John Deere or any other corporation that twists the law in ridiculous ways in their favor, but a genuine question. If you could pin down a higher-up at one of these places to find out what they really think, and ask whether this approach is actually good for their company, would anyone besides the lawyers say "yes"?