New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers
A DRM exception for farmers? Why them and not the rest of us?
Farmers are the classic American go-to for everything politics. Be it guns, corn in Coke, pollution standards, healthcare, immigration ... everyone is ready to pity the poor farmer. I understand the rational. Farmers make the food we eat. They also embody an American fantasy harkening back to the old west. But this is also who I see red flags whenever I hear farmers brought up in reference to a law.
Farmers are the purchasers of equipment used in their business. Why give them a pass to bypass DRM but not the fishermen? Fishermen make food. Maritime law affords them special treatment in a similar manner as land use laws treat farmers. Surely fishermen have an equal tradition of self-sufficiency and are also deserving of an exception. And then come the taxi companies who have long maintained their own fleets. Soldiers? Surely we first need an exemption for the armed forces.
I cannot think of any profession without a tradition of maintaining its own equipment. That's probably because DRM is new tech. So it's impossible for anyone to have a tradition of accommodating and obeying DRM. As we all suffer it, we should all be free of it. No exemptions.
Let us instead pity the poor metal worker whose CNC machine cannot be moved across the shop floor without triggering its GPS-dependant DRM.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140109/03060325817/lates...
Where I work now, I'm basically paid to break into this stuff for a living. Its nothing but a mountain of 10-20 year old "protected" protocols. All of which are now unsupported, obsolete, or completely forgotten by long out of business companies.
If the farmers think its bad now, just wait a few years. DRM hurts everyone. Its like toxic waste. A huge externalized cost that lets a company eke out a small short term extra profit at the expense of society at large. We need "clean air act" level legislation to fix it. We've actively done the opposite.
The other issue I think will be longevity. I grew up on a farm, and every piece of machinery that we used was older then I was by about 10 years, at least. Farmer's expect to purchase a tractor, and then run that piece of equipment for the entire life of the FARMER.
It feels like the tractor manufactures today are catering to the mega farms, not the smaller farms that make up a larger portion of our farming infrastructure. And the small farms only buy a new tractor every 10 - 20 years. Not every 3 - 5 years for a tax break.
Wired (and iFixit) are getting activist about DMCA exceptions. This is great. A couple weeks ago Kyle Weins wrote[1]:
"No one has yet been prosecuted for hacking their own car, but they could. And as locks become more prevalent, the EFF and iFixit are willing to bet that, eventually, some carmaker will bring the DMCA hammer down on a hobbyist's head. So we're are taking a stand now."
"Want to speak out in support of this DMCA exemption? Tell the Copyright Office that car owners should be able to repair and modify their own automobiles. You've got until February 6 to make your voice heard."
HN discussed that article too.[2]
This is just the sort of issue that inspires open-source hardware movements like the one that produced this: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Lifetrac
The most recent iteration is no match for the big commercial farm equipment, but it does have the notable advantage that being able to build it yourself necessarily means that you can diagnose its problems and repair it on the same terms.
Modern EPA requirements mean that it is impossible to design a compliant off highway commercial vehicle without relying on advanced electronic process controls. Your grandfather's tractor might be repairable with baling wire, but it also releases a ton more diesel particulates.
http://www.deere.com/en_US/ProductCatalog/FR/media/pdf/8r_se...
There's no incentive for companies to publish information on their vehicle bus interfaces, since it would basically give away trade secrets to competitors.
It sounds like there is a market for either a. Tractors with very limited electronics, but easily repairable, or b. Hi-tech tractors that are completely open systems.
What you have here is an industry ripe for disruption. John Deere makes enormous amounts of money on farm capital expenditure but also operational expenditure. But their service is crap (two days for a sensor to be fitted? Someone tell the weather not to rain or disrupt harvest, John Deere's equipment needs time to be repaired!).
In a market economy, one would think that someone would see an opportunity and, you know, compete.
Allow me to play devil's advocate here. I used to work for a company that produces measurement equipment for professional technicians. It's big, complicated, dangerous, and expensive equipment that is comparable in cost to the tractors discussed in this article. The products employ a number of measures to prevent end-users from tampering with things that shouldn't be tampered with (especially the firmware). Partly this is to discourage piracy. But mainly this is done because the equipment is quite complicated and there are not many people in the world who understand the technology well enough to make repairs on their own. It's very easy to cause unintentional errors that can cause much more serious damage than the original minor problem. And when the failure of your equipment can cause serious property damage, injury, or death are you going to make it easy for people to modify your product's firmware?
I was under the impression that farms increasingly rely on the "Tractor as a Service" business model, i.e. they pay someone who has a fleet of the latest tractors (incl operators) to harvest their fields etc.
This sounds like the same experience people have with their out-of-warranty german cars. Either take it to the stealership or buy diagnostic system made by non-VW guys. Even if you have the diagnostic system to read codes from ECU, you are left wih testing many sensors: whether the sensor needs to be replaced or cleaned. But one has to know the details of resistance etc to test the said sensor.
And these sensors are not cheap. They cost more than a tire!!
"But under modern copyright laws, that kind of “repairing” is legally questionable."
Questionable? If it becomes politically unpopular enough, they will certainly jail people for it. It's explicitly illegal but those laws are not evenly enforced. They seem to acknowledge the DMCA but then fall back to the "questionable" position saying it's "entirely possible" the farmer becomes a criminal. This is video game console modding, they are even using pirated proprietary software.
INAL, am I misunderstanding the state of things? Is there some reason, besides the political weakness created by going after farmers, that this is "questionable"?
What's built not to be repaired, is bad value for money.
Let me play devil's advocate here and suggest a few reasons why bypassing this "minor hydraulic sensor" might not be the smartest move.
1) Someone might get hurt.
2) Some really expensive part of the machine might get damaged.
It is within the realm of possibility that the engineers who designed this system knew what they were doing when they decided to shut down an entire machine when a single "minor hydraulic sensor" goes bad.
As a web developer by trade, if I wanted to get involved in a project like this, having zero farming experience, where would I start?
Not being able to fix things yourself is bad for the environment. Things that you use and throw is by design bad. DRM also means not being able to improve on the product created by the corporate entity.
As hackers we need to be able to tinker and repair the things we have bought. Components that we by need to be recycled. Your old cell phone and laptop needs to be converted to a new one not thrown on the junk yard as trash or end up at tash dumps in Africa or China.
This is the classic, unfortunate reality - the disconnect between what is legal and what is right. Yes, the companies are well within their rights to restrict access to the internals of products they sell. But by doing that, they are just being total assholes. In this case we have companies literally providing negative value (relative to older, non-DRMed equipment) and charging more.
Its designed to protect the income revenue stream of farm implements dealer at expense of the farmer whether they are single or a corporation.
The problem is the pervasiveness of our new business models that depend on perpetual dependence and licensing. It is rather ironic that in the country most obnoxious about freedom and personal property, we never really own anything; we are a culture that has been groomed on dependence on the corporate matrix.
The same issue exists, on a larger scale, for cars. Manufacturers have a motivation to lock you into dealer maintenance and DRM on the electronics is a great tool for this. We need to be the ones to educate consumers that its good when thing are hackable.
Not easy of course, but how about throwing out the computer, keeping the chassis and engine, and controlling it by another, open source, computer.
Would that be legal circumvention of the DRM?