Tractor Owners Using Pirated Firmware To Dodge John Deere's Ham-Fisted Attempt To Monopolize Repair

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We've been noting for a while how numerous states have been pushing so-called "right to repair" bills, which would make it easier for consumers to repair their own products and find replacement parts and tools. Not surprisingly, many tech companies have been working overtime to kill these bills. That includes Apple, which recently proclaimed that Nebraska's right to repair bill would turn the state into a nefarious playground for hackers. Opposition also includes Sony and Microsoft, which both tend to enjoy a repair monopoly on their respective video game consoles.Whether coming from Apple, Sony, or Microsoft, opposition to these bills usually focuses on the three (false) ideas: the bills will make users less safe, somehow "compromise" intellectual property, and open the door to cybersecurity theft.But it's easy to lose track of what started the recent groundswell of consumer support for these bills: the lowly tractor.It was John Deere's decision to implement a draconian lockdown on "unauthorized repairs" that has magically turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists. A lengthy EULA the company required customers to sign last October forbids the lion-share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned, simultaneously banning these consumers from suing over "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software."Needless to say, most of the company's customers weren't particularly impressed by the restrictions, which let companies monopolize repair, but hurt farmers' livelihoods by forcing them to visit only "authorized" repair shops that may be countless miles away from the farm. As a result, many of these folks have amusingly turned toward using unauthorized tractor firmware pirated and modified in Eastern Europe to free themselves of arbitrary, obnoxious and unnecessary restrictions on what they can do with gear they technically own:

"There's software out there a guy can get his hands on if he looks for it," one farmer and repair mechanic in Nebraska who uses cracked John Deere software told me. "I'm not a big business or anything, but let's say you've got a guy here who has a tractor and something goes wrong with itthe nearest dealership is 40 miles away, but you've got me or a diesel shop a mile away. The only way we can fix things is illegally, which is what's holding back free enterprise more than anything and hampers a farmer's ability to get stuff done, too."

"They require buyers to accept an End User License Agreement that disallows all of the activities they say are allowed in their statement," (Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org) said. "Deere is a monopolist and has systematically taken over the role of equipment owner, despite having been paid fairly and fully for equipment. Their claims to control equipment post-purchase are inconsistent with all aspects of ownership including accounting, taxation, and transfer of products into the secondary market."

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Judge Alsup Wants Uber & Waymo To Teach Him How To LiDAR Prior To Self-Driving Car Case

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Judge William Alsup certainly continues to make himself known for how he handles technology-intensive cases. In techie circles, he's mostly known for presiding over the Oracle/Google Java API copyright case, and the fact that he claimed to have learned to program in Java to better understand the issues in the case (in which he originally ruled, correctly, that APIs were not subject to copyright protection, only to be overturned by an appeals court that simply couldn't understand the difference between an API and functional code). He's also been on key cases around the no fly list and is handling some Malibu Media copyright trolling cases as well.And, last month, he was handed another big high-profile case regarding copying and Google: the big self-driving car dispute between Google's (or "Alphabet's") Waymo self-driving car company and Uber. In case you weren't following it, Waymo accused a former top employee of downloading a bunch of technical information on the LiDAR system it designed, only to then start his own self-driving car company, Otto, which was then bought up by Uber in a matter of months. Most of the lawsuit is focused on trade secrets, with a few patent claims thrown in as well.Either way, Judge Alsup appears to want to be educated on LiDAR before the case begins. In two orders last week, Judge Alsup first asked lawyers for each side to present a basic tutorial on the basics of self-driving car technology:

For a tutorial for the judge, counsel shall please make presentations to set forth the basictechnology in the public domain and prior art bearing on the trade secrets and patents at issueon the motion for provisional relief. Please do not refer to the actual systems or subsystemsused by either party. (Those will be presumably covered in the motion papers.) For the tutorial,please refer only to what is in the public domain or prior art, regardless of whether or not oneside or the other actually practices it. That is, in the tutorial, please do not say what the partiesactually practice but if the item is in the public domain, you may reference the public domainpart, even if one side or the other practices it. Make sure that all points in the tutorial reside inbooks, treatises, articles, public interviews, public videos, blogs, websites, seminars,presentations, Form 10-Ks, or other publicly verifiable sources. Please exchange approximatescripts beforehand so that each side may vet the other. Each side will have forty minutes onAPRIL 12 AT 10:00 A.M. The public may attend the entire presentation. The judge is interestedin learning the basic technology and learning publicly known art.

This would be a goodopportunity for a young lawyer to present in court.

The judge requests each side to name one (and only one) book, treatise, article or otherreference publicly available that will inform him about LiDAR, and particularly its applicationto self-driving vehicles.Please keep in mind that the judge is already familiar with basic light and opticsprinciples involving lens, such as focal lengths, the non-linear nature of focal points as afunction of distance of an object from the lens, where objects get focused to on a screen behindthe lens, and the use of a lens to project as well as to focus. So, most useful would be literatureon adapting LiDAR to self-driving vehicles, including various strategies for positioninglight-emitting diodes behind the lens for best overall effect, as well as use of a single lens toproject outgoing light as well as to focus incoming reflections (other than, of course, the patentsin suit). The judge wishes to learn the prior art and public domain art bearing on the patents insuit and trade secrets in suit.

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