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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 exist allowed to repair their own tractors and equipment thank you to the capitulation of their own lobbying group. This consequence has been gathering steam for the last few years, after aggressive moves by John Deere to lock downwardly the equipment. As our Ryan Whitwam wrote concluding 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 large 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 culling many are starting to plow to is pirating the diagnostic software themselves.

Here'southward where things are in the present twenty-four hours: Dorsum in February, the Equipment Dealer's Clan promised to brand a few concessions to farmers, promising that repair manuals, product guides, diagnostic service tools, and onboard diagnostics would all be bachelor to farmers past 2022. Only the agreement only covers equipment sold on or after January 1, 2022. It says nothing most explicitly making these tools available for older tractors. Information technology also allows tractor manufacturers to continue using software lockouts in ways that could preclude 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 ameliorate bargain, 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 Feb offering… and that's information technology.

The only divergence between what the EDA offered and what the CFBF agreed to, co-ordinate to Vice, were some minor adjustments to the statement of principles that were likewise minor to actually be noted or described. The final document was written entirely by manufacturers, for manufacturers and, as Vice notes, "information technology enshrines what the Farm Agency 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 accept literally nix 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 auction of spare parts. It states that repair and diagnostic resources will just be bachelor for tractors that haven't fifty-fifty been built yet, offering no improvements to farmers today. It does not mention annihilation nigh fair and reasonable prices for parts, but off-white and reasonable prices for maintenance and diagnostic information. At that place'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 exist expected to negotiate on. At the very least, they're issues that tie into the larger question of how much command manufacturers should exist able to exert over a product one time it leaves the factory floor. Farmers might be interested in those questions only their representatives apparently weren't.

Now Read: GM, John Deere Want to Make Tinkering Illegal, Farmers are Pirating John Deere Tractor Software, and FTC Promises Legal Action if Warranty-Voiding Stickers Aren't Fixed