Many of us have downloaded cracked software from the darker corners of
the internet over the years. Remember when the only way to get Photoshop
was to buy a $700 license? Yeah, enough said. Some of the most prolific
users of cracked software these days aren't who you think. Farmers
across the USA are grabbing modified copies of tractor software from
sketchy Eastern European websites to get around John Deere's draconian
software restrictions. Large-scale farming is now a heavily mechanized
industry, and some of these pieces of machinery can cost several times
as much as your car. John Deere is becoming known as a particularly
troublesome company to deal with when you need to make repairs on one of
the expensive pieces of farm equipment you bought. Farmers explained to
Motherboard recently how the software running on their tractors make
even simple repairs a pain. John Deere's tractor firmware prevents the
owners from making an unauthorized repairs. Whenever maintenance is
needed, an authorized agent needs to swing by and connect to the tractor
with diagnostic software. They okay the repair, and the tractor to
works. Without that, it's a very big paperweight. John Deere charges
several hundred dollars for service calls, plus $150 per hour for the
technician. When techs aren't available, they have to wait. The
alternative many are starting to turn to is pirating the diagnostic
software themselves. Most of the cracked John Deere programs seem to be
coming out of Poland and Ukraine. Gaining access involves finding one of
the secretive invite-only forums and paying a membership fee. Once
inside, farmers can buy John Deere's software kits for a few hundred
dollars -- the cost of just a few maintenance checks. The legality of
this is questionable. The Librarian of Congress has approved a temporary
exemption to the DMCA that allows owners of land vehicles to circumvent
locked down software. Doing it with cracked software is a different
matter. The farm-heavy state of Nebraska is one of those pushing
right-to-repair legislation, which would render John Deere's license
agreement void. Then, it would have to sue individual customers for
violating the contract if it wanted to enforce it. Naturally, it's
fighting the legislation hard. Farmers fear what will happen if right to
repair doesn't become law. Will John Deere get to decided when their
tractors stop working by ending repair service? It's like when a game
developer shuts down the online authentication server for that game you
bought five years ago. Except instead a game that cost you $40, it's a
tractor that cost $30,000 and should be able to run for years to come.Farmers in California have lost the fight to be allowed to repair their own tractors and equipment thanks to the capitulation of their own lobbying group. This issue has been gathering steam for the last few years, after aggressive moves by John Deere to lock down the equipment. As our Ryan Whitwam wrote last year:
John Deere’s tractor firmware prevents the owners from making an unauthorized repairs. Whenever maintenance is needed, an authorized agent needs to swing by and connect to the tractor with diagnostic software. They okay the repair, and the tractor then works. Without that, it’s a very big paperweight. John Deere charges several hundred dollars for service calls, plus $150 per hour for the technician. When techs aren’t available, they have to wait. The alternative many are starting to turn to is pirating the diagnostic software themselves.
Here’s where things are in the present day: Back in February, the Equipment Dealer’s Association promised to make a few concessions to farmers, promising that repair manuals, product guides, diagnostic service tools, and onboard diagnostics would all be available to farmers by 2021. But the agreement only covers equipment sold on or after January 1, 2021. It says nothing about explicitly making these tools available for older tractors. It also allows tractor manufacturers to continue using software lockouts in ways that could prevent repair. All of this is what the EDA promised voluntarily, with no negotiation. The California Farm Bureau Federation was ostensibly supposed to push for a better deal, including continuing to fight for so-called “Right to repair” legislation in the state legislature. Instead, the organization has signed an agreement with the EDA that codifies the voluntary February offer… and that’s it.
Principles
The only difference between what the EDA offered and what the CFBF agreed to, according to Vice, were some minor adjustments to the statement of principles that were too minor to actually be noted or described. The final document was written entirely by manufacturers, for manufacturers and, as Vice notes, “it enshrines what the Farm Bureau of California now believes farmers are not supposed to do with their tractors, which includes modifying the embedded software.”
Farmers are effectively out of the right to repair fight in California and have literally nothing to show for it that they weren’t getting from the EDA already. The final agreement doesn’t address the fact that John Deere monopolizes tractor repair. It makes no provision for the sale of spare parts. It states that repair and diagnostic resources will only be available for tractors that haven’t even been built yet, offering no improvements to farmers today. It does not mention anything about fair and reasonable prices for parts, only fair and reasonable prices for maintenance and diagnostic information. There’s also no mention of how patches, updates, or firmware will be distributed to farmers.
These are precisely the sorts of points that a group like the CFBF might be expected to negotiate on. At the very least, they’re issues that tie into the larger question of how much control manufacturers should be able to exert over a product once it leaves the factory floor. Farmers might be interested in those questions but their representatives apparently weren’t.
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