This should be extended to software
We have the Digital Human Right to adversarial interoperability no matter the dimension/interface.
John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
81–90 of 320 posts
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#82Bananas that stuff like this needs to get litigated in our society - if you asked 100 random people "should farmers be able to repair their equipment", you would get 100 yes's.
Except it is not the right question in a market economy like ours. The right question is "what is the value (in dollars) of the right for farmers to repair their equipment". If John Deere values it more than farmers, then they will sell tractors that farmers can't repair on their own, hoping to earn more on repairs rather than easier to repair tractors that are more expensive up front. Basic market economy. It only n…
> If John Deere values it more than farmers, then they will sell tractors that farmers can't repair on their own, hoping to earn more on repairs rather than easier to repair tractors that are more expensive up front. Basic market economy.
It isn't possible for that to happen without one of your other concerns also being true, because the profits from preventing repairs come from the customers. So it's at best zero sum and in practice it's negative sum, because the manufacturer isn't always the most efficient party to do the repair, e.g. because the farmer who is already on site and does it themselves can get the equipment back in service faster than waiting for the company's mechanic to arrive.
Meanwhile in cases where the manufacturer is the most efficient party to do the repair, the customer could still use them even if nothing forced them to. So the fact of it happening is by itself proof of this:
> It only needs to be litigated when there is a threat to the market itself (ex: monopolies)
Moreover, notice that this keeps happening with tech products. Since customers don't like it, you would expect a competitor to show up and make the exact same product but without the locks, so why don't we see that? The answer, of course, is copyright, a government-granted monopoly. The law prohibits a competitor from copying their design/code. So there's your monopoly.
But copyright is only meant to prevent the competitor from making a direct copy of their software and competing with them in the market for the original product. They're only supposed to have that monopoly. Leveraging that to monopolize the separate market for repairs is monopoly abuse, and applies equally to every company selling a product covered by a patent or copyright monopoly.
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#83In the last decade, on a fleet of almost 30 Deere machines from lawnmowers to high-clearance sprayers and combines, I could count on one hand the number of times I've needed the Deere laptop to diagnose a problem to fix it.
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#84> Deere must pay $1 million collectively to the five states for antitrust enforcement costs and will be subject to strict compliance oversight for the next 10 years. $1 million fine for probably $10 billion in profit. I know what lesson I'd learn if my only personal value was maximizing shareholder value. The compliance part can be dealt with later.
>probably $10 billion in profit Can you expand on this number or is it vibes-based? I'd be surprised if $10b profit was made from Service Advisor. Anecdata; we've had a handful of problems with our tractor "computers" recently, and we haven't been charged a dime by the dealer. Our newest is 2018 model so definitely not covered by warranty.
In 2025 John Deere net income was $4,998m. $1m is 0.02% of that. They make it in less than 2 days. Imagine making money in an unlawful way for years then paying only 2 days worth of salary.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DE/deere/cash-flow...
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#85> Deere must pay $1 million collectively to the five states for antitrust enforcement costs and will be subject to strict compliance oversight for the next 10 years. $1 million fine for probably $10 billion in profit. I know what lesson I'd learn if my only personal value was maximizing shareholder value. The compliance part can be dealt with later.
This is a negotiated settlement. The FTC agreed to settle without Deere admitting wrongdoing. Deere did give up something far more valuable than the $1M by agreeing to the right to repair. You can argue that instead of accepting the settlement, FTC should have taken the risk of going to trial. But Deere agreed to change their practices without that risk.
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#86I’ll believe it when I hear farmers telling me it’s true
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Admittedly I have never worked in the agriculture industry, but I have been a mechanical engineer for multiple industries before I became a software engineer (a good 5 years I was in a position where I quoted customers). You really cannot imagine that out of the 44B gross revenue and 5B net, that a "non tiny fraction" was not related to right the repair? Collections of receivables + Proceeds from sales of equipment o…
Yup. The two things John Deere did was make it impossible to diagnose problems with software lockouts and they did software locks for common parts. 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.
Also, I'd point out that tractors are, by and large, actually pretty simple machines. At their core they are an engine and a hydraulics system. Not much more. The most fancy tractors will obviously have a lot of creature comforts in the cab. GPS, auto steering, AC, etc. But the actual things that do the thing are effectively just solid metal parts that plow through the field or cut down the crop.
Tractors, because they are so simple, but also because they all operate at lower speeds than other vehicles, are almost immoral machines. My family literally has a John Deere from the 40s that starts up just fine. We also have a Massie from the the 70s that still operates just fine. And our newest Massie from the 00s is still doing farm work. The only reason we got the Massie in the 70s was because it had more horsepower than the John Deere from the 40s. And the only reason for the 00s tractor was because it had a closed cab with AC and more horsepower.
It would not shock me to learn John Deere was also integrating some planned obsolescence to speed up the turn over of their tractors.
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#88Shout out to Louis Rossmann for doing a ton of work on Right to repair. He started a website called Consumer Rights Wiki to document anti-consumer practices. https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page He's also involved with FULU Foundation which has a bounty of 25k to get Ring cameras working without Amazon's servers. https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/ring-video-doorbells
I appreciate everything he stands for - he's on the right side of just about every issue. I just wish he could make more succinct and effective videos.
His video style is just fine, him and his cats. I don't mind the expletives as the people/companies he uses it against deserves them but I had instances where I couldn't show his videos to some elderly people because of the expletives.
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#89In the last decade, on a fleet of almost 30 Deere machines from lawnmowers to high-clearance sprayers and combines, I could count on one hand the number of times I've needed the Deere laptop to diagnose a problem to fix it.
Well I guess you speak for everyone. Let's ban a persons right to repair.
Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest loss to them is the right to repair stuff. They will be still making it exceptionally difficult to repair their stuff, and might even dip into exotic materials to make cheaper parts fail more often, but this is a bigger loss to them in the long run. Unfortunately, I hate that they got away with such a low AF fine.
They only have to behave for 10 years before they can go back to being hostile parasitic vultures.
And how much they gave to behave is directly related to how much they donate to the election fund, because that is literally the world we are living in now, as every single tech CEO all know and behave as.