This legislation is more akin to allowing you to repair your PC and replace a damaged RAM module.
I don’t think any farmer is looking to tinker with the control software, and even if they want they should be able to tinker considering it’s their property and their farmland and only they themselves are liable for any damages caused to neighbours or otherwise.
John Deere is just trying to create artificial barriers and extract more value from existing customers.
(As an outsider looking in) I think Deere's (and many other companies) financial incentives more align with product gatekeeping, than with maximum safety and performance; maximum safety does not pay Deere's bills, but service appointments do.
It kinda just sounds like you're content with family farms not existing, because all of your points fail to address the economic realities for these farms.
Product liability for industrial and agricultural equipment gets interesting.
You can modify a household lawn mower and if you get maimed by it by those modifications, you're at fault.
However, for industrial equipment if you can modify it - the manufacturer is likely liable. Consider how often you hear about deaths due to manufacturing defects (the stats for deaths for framers is 60 - 70 per year per 100,000 in the US).
> However, for industrial equipment if you can modify it - the manufacturer is likely liable.
That’s interesting if true, but do you have a better source (ideally, a court case)? I don’t see that theory of liability discussed anywhere on the page you linked.
The main piece is that industrial and agricultural equipment falls into the category of strict liability. Going back up a few parent posts:
> >They're designing the products for maximum safety and performance
> How do you know this. Do you work for Jon Deere? Since the code is closed source that's simply an assumption
If you have a piece of equipment that is known to be dangerous (e.g. farm equipment like combines and such) then anything that is considered a defect or failure to warn about and prevent someone from using the equipment in an unsafe way the liability falls on the manufacturer - even if there is no proof of negligence in its design.
> Strict liability, in contrast, does away with the analysis of whether the defendant's conduct met or fell below a certain standard. The thinking here is this: If it were necessary for a consumer to identify and illustrate the specific unsafe or unreasonable conduct that occurred at some point along the timeline of a product's journey to the marketplace—including design, manufacture, and distribution—these kinds of cases would be nearly unwinnable. Courts and state legislatures recognize this, so strict liability is established law in product defect cases.
> Simply because a plaintiff is required to prove less in a strict product liability case (compared with a negligence-based action) does not mean a defendant's liability is automatic. There are a number of ways a strict liability case can fail, or be successfully defended. The defendant might be able to show that:
> the plaintiff used the product in a way that he or she knew (or should have known) could lead to injury, or used the product despite knowing of the defect ("assumption of the risk")
> the plaintiff's own careless actions contributed to or were the only cause of the injury, including using the product in a manner for which it was not intended, or
> some other person or event interacted with the product to such an extent that the product was not the real cause of the injury.
---
So, here's the question that will be posed.
Does a farmer using 3rd party firmware on their JD tractor know that this could lead to injury?
Is using 3rd party firmware in a JD tractor careless?
Is a farmer updating the firmware of a tractor sufficient interaction with it that the JD tractor itself is not the real cause of injury?
If these questions are answered with "no" then JD is responsible and would be expected to take all reasonable actions to prevent those interactions.
> They're designing the products for maximum safety and performance. It was never in the cards to make it open.
Well, then, that was stupid of John Deere and makes them a victim of their own arrogance. Period. There wouldn't be a law right now if John Deere hadn't unnecessarily, by their own actions, pissed off so many people in the process of increasing "safety" and "performance". As though anybody complained about the lack of "safety and performance" in the century-long history of tractors before computers came along and saved us.
Let's be clear here: John Deere, a multi-billion dollar company, isn't the victim here, but the aggressor against family farms, good intentions or not. Mourning for them is absurd.
> A huge change, that will take years and millions to achieve?
Nope. It's as easy as clicking "Publish" on the repositories and setting the Dropbox folder to "Public." I could do it in 15 minutes. Any legal review or trade secret review or whatever else is entirely the company protecting their own interests. John Deere has done that long enough, a hard deadline is their self-inflicted penalty.
