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IPFS News Link • Legislative Mischief

John Deere's Weird Idea of 'Ownership'

• http://www.thedailybell.com

It's official: John Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don't own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway.

In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world's largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don't own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive "an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle."

It's John Deere's tractor, folks. You're just driving it. – Wired, April 21, 2015

Property rights are the cornerstone of a free society. They were already under attack long before John Deere started computerizing farm tractors. Usually the attackers are from some level of government, but large corporations are joining the fun.

It's official: John Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don't own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway.

In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world's largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don't own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive "an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle."

It's John Deere's tractor, folks. You're just driving it. – Wired, http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ April 21, 2015

Property rights are the cornerstone of a free society. They were already under attack long before John Deere started computerizing farm tractors. Usually the attackers are from some level of government, but large corporations are joining the fun.

Yet the corporate attacks typically use politically created weapons. John Deere relies on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act to claim that the farmers who "buy" its tractors possess only the physical machinery, not the software that makes it run.

Not coincidentally, normal maintenance is almost impossible without access to this software. This effectively forces farmers to keep paying John Deere for the tractor long after they supposedly gained ownership of it.

Some farmers try to avoid this extortion by hacking their own tractors. John Deere claims this is illegal under the DMCA law and is asking the Copyright Office to stop it.

John Deere is not the only company to make this argument. As Wired points out, every major automobile manufacturer takes this same position. (Tesla is the only exception.)

General Motors is particularly passionate about its "intellectual property" claims. Wired writer Kyle Wiens dismisses their arguments.

GM went so far as to argue locking people out helps innovation. That's like saying locking up books will inspire kids to be innovative writers, because they won't be tempted to copy passages from a Hemingway novel. Meanwhile, outside of Bizarroland, actual technology experts—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation—have consistently labeled the DMCA an innovation killer. They insist that, rather than stopping content pirates, language in the DMCA has been used to stifle competition and expand corporate control over the life (and afterlife) of products.


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