Desperate John Deere tractor owners are downloading illegal Ukrainian firmware hacks to get the crops in

Cory Doctorow

John Deere is notorious for arguing that farmers who buy its tractors actually "license" them because Deere still owns the copyright to the tractors' software; in 2015, the US Copyright Office affirmed that farmers were allowed to jailbreak their tractors to effect repairs and modifications.

But the Copyright Office doesn't have the legal power to allow anyone to make a tool to make such modifications, which makes the Copyright Office exemption pretty symbolic.

Nevertheless, Deere responded immediately to the Copyright Office ruling by amending the EULA for its tractors to prohibit any such modification, third party repairs, etc, and made farmers click through the EULA and "agree" to it in order to start up their tractors.

Now, farmers find themselves in desperate straits. Not only does Deere gouge them on repairs ("$230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize [a user-swapped] part"), but the repair shops can be far away or busy, and thus a half-million dollar tractor can sit immobilized while a farmer frets about getting his crops in.

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Continua qui: https://boingboing.net/2017/03/22/make-hay-while-the-sun-shines.html