company:john deere

EU hijacking: self-driving car data will be copyrighted...by the manufacturer / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2018/10/10/corporate-kitts.html

https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/herbie-the-love-bug-the-love-bug-40942517-1600-900.jpg

The autonomous vehicle rules contained a clause that affirmed that “data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on databases inapplicable.”

This is pretty inoffensive stuff. Copyright protects creative work, not factual data, and the telemetry generated by your car — self-driving or not — is not copyrighted.

But just before the vote, members of the European Peoples’ Party (the same bloc that pushed through the catastrophic new Copyright Directive) stopped the proceedings with a rare “roll call” and voted down the clause.

In other words, they’ve snuck in a space for the telemetry generated by autonomous vehicles to become someone’s property. This is data that we will need to evaluate the safety of autonomous vehicles, to fine-tune their performance, to ensure that they are working as the manufacturer claims — data that will not be public domain (as copyright law dictates), but will instead be someone’s exclusive purview, to release or withhold as they see fit.

Who will own this data? It’s unlikely that it will be the owners of the vehicles. Just look at the data generated by farmers who own John Deere tractors. These tractors create a wealth of soil data, thanks to humidity sensors, location sensors and torque sensors — a centimeter-accurate grid of soil conditions in the farmer’s own field.

Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware - Motherboard
►https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-fir

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America’s heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that’s cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

“To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America’s heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that’s cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.”

►https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-fir

#CopyrightMadness #InternetOfThings #RightToTinker #RightToRepair #Tractors #FreeSoftware

The ’Right to Repair’ Movement Is Being Led by Farmers - Motherboard
▻https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/farmers-right-to-repair

Farmers are pushing back against legislation that prevents them from fixing their own equipment. If successful, it will be a huge victory for consumers.

A major national group has adopted a policy to fight for the right to repair electronics, but it might not be the one you’d expect: farmers.

The right to repair movement is an effort to loosen laws to allow consumers to be able to fix technology without sending it back to the original manufacturer. Right now, replacement parts and diagnostic tools are carefully guarded by the manufacturer, and right to repair supporters believe they should be available to the public. The effort has largely been driven by the consumer tech sector—like people who want to be able to fix their iPhone instead of buying a new one—but the lack of access to repair materials has greatly impacted farmers, too.

Modern farm equipment is high tech and includes onboard computers, but the majority of farming equipment manufacturers refuse to allow access to the software, claiming it’s proprietary information. That means farmers are stuck waiting for a John Deere technician to swap a tiny sensor when it misfires and shuts down the entire tractor.

They’d rather just fix it themselves or, at the very least, take it to someone locally who can do the job. But right now, that’s not possible.

Aux USA, un agriculteur n’achète pas son matériel, mais il achète une licence d’utilisation à vie. Du coup il n’est pas autorisé à réparer lui-même son tracteur...

#agriculture #copyright_madness

Farmers fight for the right to repair their own tractors | MNN - Mother Nature Network
▻http://www.mnn.com/your-home/organic-farming-gardening/blogs/tractor-scheme-farmers-fight-right-fix-their-own-john-deeres

However, since 1998, the year the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) made the life of hardworking farmers’ all the more complicated, the owners of tractors, sprayers, harvesters, combines, loaders, bailers and all sorts of other agricultural machinery have been legally prohibited from embarking on their own repairs or enlisting independent mechanics to get the job done.

As Modern Farmer recently explained, the reason for this is frustratingly simple: manufacturers of farming equipment, namely John Deere, do not consider farmers to be the true owners of said equipment. Rather, farmers have purchased an “implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”