As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights.

As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them.

When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms.

I remember reading Stallman's short story "The Right to Read" in the 1990s. I found it alarmist and completely unrealistic. I read it today and am forced to recognize that Stallman was exactly right.

If we had that kind of lease on software, but without IP laws, there still wouldn't be any strange legal consequences. The lessee gets the software, and perhaps the terms say that the lessee cannot copy or modify the software. The difference is that if the lessee does distribute a copy of the software, the lessor cannot go after third parties who download those copies, because they haven't signed any sort of lease or contract. The lessor can go after the lessee, of course, but that's it.

This latter description shouldn't be described as an "attack on ownership" any more than renting a car from the airport is an attack on ownership. The real attack on ownership is the existence of IP laws. You own your hard drive, but only until the hard drive happens to arrange some bits in a particular order.

The difficulty I see with the current and future legal landscape is that there's no clear distinction between right-to-modify and right-to-distribute.

It might be argued that this has been a willful conflation by IP owners in an attempt to best sell their agenda. (Right-to-modify-something-owned being substantially more in line with pre-digital norms)

My understanding was that the point of the DCMA's reasonable clauses was to clarify that yes, if you own something, you also own the right to modify it. Including the right to circumvent any artificial technical limits placed on your ability to modify. The tension has always been that modifiable devices can also strip technical protections from IP to enable distribution.

To me, I can't see how we end up with any alternative to the following two options (which I think the Stallman-position cardboard cutout would argue as well):

[World A] Users do not have a right to distribute IP. To ensure this, IP encrypted. Breaking IP encryption is illegal. To ensure breaking IP encryption is also impossible, modifying at least some portion of software/firmware/hardware in consumer devices is also illegal. To ensure modification is also impossible, technical measures are employed (aka "Nightmare TPM").

[World B] The legality of distributing IP is irrelevant. The legality of breaking IP encryption is irrelevant. Breaking IP encryption is feasible, because modifying the software/firmware/hardware of consumer devices is feasible.

The road to cyberpunk ethos was always that [World A] would be enacted legally (because money), while [World B] would be de facto reality (because consumers get creeped out by TPM and there are more hardware companies interested in selling units than vertically integrated IP stakeholders^).

^Bonus points for those who remember when Apple was the former rather than the latter

In the context of entering a contract, I don't see either as "rights." If you sign a contract saying that you will pay a certain amount to use a tractor without modifying its internals or distributing copies of its source code, I am fine with a legal system enforcing that contract.

If it's only legal, I'd argue that's a slippery slope towards a legal system of convenience and loss of absolute respect for the rule of law. In other words "Yes, this action is illegal, but everyone does it anyway by necessity."

If it's both, then the technical methods for doing so become frightening pretty fast.

Both.

> If it's only legal, I'd argue that's a slippery slope towards a legal system of convenience and loss of absolute respect for the rule of law.

Well, as you might have guessed by my references to contract law, I'm not a huge fan of statutory law. "Rule of law" is only good if the laws are good.

> In other words "Yes, this action is illegal, but everyone does it anyway by necessity."

If people want to modify their products, then that should be a competitive advantage for firms that offer products with terms allowing modification.

> If it's both, then the technical methods for doing so become frightening pretty fast.

Why?

> Well, as you might have guessed by my references to contract law, I'm not a huge fan of statutory law. "Rule of law" is only good if the laws are good.

> If people want to modify their products, then that should be a competitive advantage for firms that offer products with terms allowing modification.

> Why? [do the technical methods for preventing modification become frightening]

I'm getting the sense that we have fundamentally different opinions of the way the way the market works. In my view, it's entirely reasonable that the following chain of events unfolds:

a) Company A builds product that prevents users from making modifications (legally and technically)

b) The product captures a substantial market share (variety of means: maybe exclusive content, advertising, etc.)

c) Because the product prevents users from making modifications, it can extract higher profit-per-user than competitors (by taking advantage of revenue streams unavailable to sellers of a more open product)

d) Those higher profits can then be leveraged into a more dominant market position (regulatory capture, buying budding competitors, etc.)

I have a feeling you would say "(b) would not happen because the market would correct in favor of consumers and away from Company A."

My opinion is the market only self-stabilizes within certain bounds: once things get too out of whack, there is no guaranteed correction.

Tractors manufactured in the 1960s are still in regular use today, to a far greater extent than e.g. automobiles of that era. Although there are regular improvements, the core task of pulling implements across a field has not changed, and the same giant piles of steel that function today should still function decades from now. The portion of tractor owners and users who would welcome the dystopia you envision is minuscule.

At the very least the labeling laws should require clearly distinguishing between purchase and lease. If there's a part of the product that you're only leasing and not buying, the whole thing must say "lease" or "rent". It would be funny to see amazon forced to relabel their site like that though...

Can you say that it's really owned if you can't separate the leased part and can't use the thing without the leased part?

I mean, sure, you're free to write any sort of contract you want, free market yadda yadda, but I think there's something meaningful in the point the article makes here...

Tesla is another example of a company walking a thin line. I'd be OK with their software updates to the car, and I'd actually rather take this further: I am not into car repair and I just want to use the vehicle for transportation, so a rental/lease agreement is fine with me.

The same problem exists with many other devices that we seemingly "own". Phones are a good example: they are rapidly becoming computing devices that we "buy", but don't really own, as we can't use them without the software, which is "licensed". Again, not a huge problem for me in the case of a phone, but let's be clear that I don't really "own" much more than a decorated doorstop/brick. I really pay an upfront rental fee with the expectation of using the device for about 2-3 years.

Time and time again it happened. And invariably, Stallman was right all along.

Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law is focused on precisely the mechanism by which our society grants rent-collection privileges to concentrated wealth. His core principle is that we must proactively ensure that concentrated wealth is not permitted to collect rent on EVERYTHING in the world, or else we will all be made their serfs forever.

Channeling Stallman here, there's no such thing as "intellectual property law". There are a bunch of laws that work in very different ways, evolved under different circumstances, and have different purposes. Copyrights are for ensuring authors retain economic and/or moral rights on their work, patents are so that inventors will disclose their inventions instead of keeping them as trade secrets, and trademarks are so that consumers don't get duped into buying the wrong product. There are other sets of laws that have other purposes and histories, such as regional designation or shipwright designs.

Lumping them all together as "intellectual property" promotes oversimplication and confusion.

If you don't know, you're wasting our time with snarky but baseless "PC" attitude. At least put in a few more keystrokes to actually tell us what you'd like to happen here; if other people agree, maybe it will happen. If you do know something, then tell us what it is, don't expect mind-reading.

Apologies if I've misread your meaning. I expect one-word posts are especially susceptible to that...

It's also possible that English is not pdx mother tongue, maybe pdx tongue is one of those where the male pronoun is used to refer to people when the sex is unknown. Also, while it's usage as this has been fading, "he" is defined as "Used to refer to a person or animal of unspecified sex" in many dictionaries, and someone could have been tough that in school (I have been).

Jordi, you're being a dumbass dude. Jordi is usually a mans name. Of course I assume male. Take the stupid PC bullshit down, OK?

https://www.google.com/search?q=pictures+of+jordi&tbm=isch

    So, now that we're inulting each other and no longer civil, you're
    being a flaming asshole and the reason women don't want to be in tech.
    Fuck off and die.

    - Jordi G. H.

You WERE being a dumbass. You DO need to take the stupid PC bullshit down.

Neither of these statements is actually that insulting. I did not call you a dumbass, I said you were being a dumbass in this instance. I did not call you stupid. l told you to take the stupid PC bullshit down (which you do need to do).

Now, telling somebody to Fuck off and die, that is insulting. I think your latin temper is showing itself, my friend. It's abolutely not OK to tell me to fuck off and die. It doesn't reflect well on you, or your organization. You need to wind it down.

I don't have a problem with your response in general, or ideas like "male should not be the default gender". I often try to avoid using gendered pronouns, for reasons like this. If the original person had said something like that, I probably wouldn't have replied. I do have a problem with someone casually questioning the use of a word, without demonstrating any consideration of whether it is actually correct, whether an effort was made to make sure it was correct, etc. For all we knew, the person who used "he" personally knows you, and mindfully chose to use a male pronoun. That uninformed, knee-jerk reply ("He?") is as useless and obnoxious as having a bot post "PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: REMEMBER THAT NOT ALL HACKERS ARE MALE. WE WELCOME WOMEN!" every time someone uses the word "he."

Really, to go full-on PC for the benefit of trans people, etc., I guess we can't use gendered pronouns even if we do know someone, unless we have been explicitly (and recently) told which pronoun they prefer.

However, its absolutely correct that it is really a crude blanket term that lacks precision and deals with several different things that are thematically linked, but quite separate in reality. its not bad for someone to expand on a point I've made with those additional details. it adds to the discussion, I think.

Books are hard to copy, while files are easy to copy. Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them... even while they will pay the same for a fancy cup of coffee. Hence a scramble for some way to set up a toll booth that is hard to circumvent... DRM, streaming, proprietary reading platforms like Kindle, etc.

Stallman is absolutely right and was a visionary for seeing this when he did, but he doesn't get the full breadth of the problem. In his world, the creators of things starve. People can't have freedom because they want "free," which means slavery for the producers of content. (Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.) Stallman can ignore this side of the equation because he is a tenured academic. It doesn't matter to him that nobody pays for his work.

What we need is some kind of open digital rights tracking system that does not rely on hardware locks and that lets certain bits of information behave like physical objects with physical characteristics. It's a hard problem, but hard problems get solved. I used to think cryptocurrency was impractical in practice. Maybe something can be done with homomorphic encryption. Too bad nobody is working on this because everyone still thinks we can make everything "free" and (magic happens here) and the creators of things can somehow still eat.

Pages and even chapters of books have been copied by photocopiers (found in many libraries!) for decades. The only limit to the copying was how many quarters you had.

You need to give up the idea that people need to get paid for the stuff they get paid for today, that everyone who makes money doing something today, needs to make at least that much on the same thing in the future.

People will have to do whatever they can get paid for, which is the case for most people today anyway. Creators won't starve, they'll create less and have a real job.

You think the problem of "creators starving" is so bad it justifies anything and everything needed to prevent it. I don't.

Wow.

I see lots of this kind of sentiment when I bring this up, but yours deserves credit for being exceptionally honest.

With this kind of overproduction, it's no surprise creators can't make money.

It's funny how this was noticed by King Solomon, far before the age of print. "Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." (Ecclesiastes 12:12b). Apparently information overload was a problem even back then.

Anyway, I agree that we have too much content, but not content in general. We have too much for-profit content. I can't back this up with numbers, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of content creation is just an indirect form of advertising.

Take news sites. Why all those articles are so crappy, full of mistakes, and often outright lies? Because news sites don't care about the truth; the content is just the way to make you see the ads.

Or take all those images people repost on social media. I have a close friend working as a "content marketer", so I get to see first-hand how those images are made. There are people whose job is literally to create dozens of such pictures every week and post them on the pages they manage. The pages themselves are only tangentially related to what is advertised.

The whole scheme works like this: imagine you want to advertise a fitness club you own. So you create a bunch of Facebook pages about dieting, general health and exercise, and you hire a bunch of people to make you an image or two for each page, every day, and to spread them around in a way that links back to said pages. The images are usually pretty useless; the content doesn't matter as long as people share and "like" it. The idea is that you will waste a little bit of lots of people's time hoping that a percent of a percent of those people will convert and pay enough to justify all that social media carpet-bombing.

Frankly, I find this scheme evil, but for some reason it is a respected occupation nowadays...

The problem we really need to solve is wasting other people's time to make money. Content overload will fix itself then.

Humans are really good at creating things, that's what I think we are here to do, not "work".

quoted from emphasis. remove money from intellectual property and you remove some incentive, from both good actors and bad ones.

Maybe in a future utopian society everyone is somehow above average, or there are radically fewer humans that just are really smart, but right now most of the people are not going to create top-tier "content". And there are enough people creating top-tier content, and enough top-tier content in the history of human art, that I don't need any more content. Who is going to pay them? Why should I? Why should the state? Why is this is a thing we should be buying? I can think of at least ten better uses for my money.

Or from another angle: why don't we destroy half of the content of the world? Surely we have enough with the remainings. If we were to find tomorrow another intelligent species, would you be interested in their culture? Or won't you have time to read it?

Right now there are limits on what we can communicate, limits placed in the name of "protecting content creators." These limits are a kluge. For example, what if I where to take a song, compress it a ton, then read out loud the base64 representation to a friend who is transcribing it.

Have I infringed the copyright of that song? Or was I simply describing it so precisely that I allowed my friend to reproduce it flawlessly? If I sing the lyrics to my friend and he learns that, are we breaking a law? And more importantly, should we be breaking the law when we do this?

Why can't we communicate whatever we want? Why haven't we accepted that the progress of technology will slowly make all things a matter of "communication"?

I think that part of the answer to that question is a deep anxiety over such a profound shift in the "business" of our society. It would mean much would have to change, and while I'd argue that change would be for the better, I understand that anxiety.

Which would be more valuable, doubling the world's content, or doubling the amount of time and money to spend on it?

Let's say we cut "literary production" in half somehow. Is it better if everyone writes a little bit, or if we all pay someone who's really good at it to do it? I'd rather read a professional writer than my own ramblings, which means I'd rather a subset of good writers were able to earn a living off it.

If so, then we should just spend all day reading /dev/urandom. Infinite content there.

> Or from another angle: why don't we destroy half of the content of the world? Surely we have enough with the remainings.

If we destroyed the half that is advertisement in disguise, the world would be much better off.

> If we were to find tomorrow another intelligent species, would you be interested in their culture? Or won't you have time to read it?

I would, but I'd happily limit my time spent on analyzing ways members of that culture abuse one another and look for something interesting to learn from them.

This seems a rather arbitrary performance ceiling to strive for.

A "real job" is something you do to get reliable income. More often than not, it implies working for someone else. "Real job" don't have to be interesting, fulfilling, or even productive. If yours is, great, but that is not their main function. Their main function is to get you to pay the bills.

Hence my issue with the qualifier: "real". "Real" implies something inherently good, or at least better than the alternative. It also implies the alternative isn't "real", meaning it has less or no value. Add enough confusion, and you get a moral imperative to work your ass off for a boss that doesn't care about you, instead of creating pieces of art.

This way of thinking would lead to a bleak world. We should say "real job" less often —if at all.

It's absurd to suggest that people should get 'real jobs.' Life is a real job, and we've all already got it.

As automation and artificial intelligence become more prevalent, why would we use humans to fill 'real jobs'?

.. working for Google, Apple, Tivo, and every other company that bastardizes software into opaque services to extract profits via leasing.

I think imaginary property laws can't die a quick enough death. But I also sympathize with api's viewpoint about the inevitable effects on the economy and incentives for what gets created. You'd do well to internalize both ideas and see if you can't discover some synergy.

The creators of things can do whatever they want in Stallmans world. They just cannot use the state as a weapon against the sharing of information they created, or more appropriately, hold a state issued right to control. A tool to deny the propagation of knowledge in all its forms which destroys culture (how much media from the 20th century is lost forever again?) and cripples social progress.

Nothing about dissolving the false economy of existent information scarcity means anyone needs to stop producing it. Just because you cannot control everything about your information beyond simple goods exchange, that you cannot deny people access to it if someone else who has it wishes to provide it, and that you cannot stymie it for profit does not mean you still cannot create information as a profession, in all its forms. Most modern visual artists online today operate off a model without transfer based rent seeking (ie, commissioning, or for comic artists patreon or kickstarter models).

That's not true at all. Stallman is against DRM in general, not state-backed DRM specifically.

There is nothing standing in the way of content creators selling GPL code, and even keeping it private until its been bought. Full stop. stop perpetuating this fallacious myth abouth FOSS, please.

That being said, the real issue still is about ownership. If I buy a block of wood, even if you already shaped it into your "art" i have every right to modify it as I see fit. Its a physical thing that I own. Now, I couldnt copy your work and sell it though.

In reality a tractor isnt that much different. Its a physical object, with software "which could be argued is also physical in the form of 1s and 0s", and if I buy it I have the right to modify it as I see fit. What if something goes wrong with the software and I want to fix it? Oh no, thats illegal?!

In reality this is about control of the user, and money, not about anything else. It reduces freedom and security and functionality in almost every way.

A good example of this is my bad purchase of a samsung smart tv. Even though I know its running linux and hence gplv2, samsung has made it almost impossible to root the device without bricking it. Why? because they want control over the user and lots of their money system is setup around that. Its not about protecting the user. Its not about warranty issues, because I would gladly click the "i accept that my device is no longer under warranty if I load debian on it instead of your crappy samsung os". Its about app store and ad money, and pitentially about surveillance.

RedHat, Suse, I just got done telling you Samsung, Zentyal, just off the top of my head, tons more if you just did a quick search. Note that sometimes it's bundled with hardware, or it's the support that makes them *the most8 money, but quite often they still make money selling the software too, so lets put this myth about practicality to rest.

The simple fact is that selling free software has not been shown to be a viable business model. There are businesses that have shown the value of using free software, and businesses that have made good money supporting free software, but creating and selling free software just doesn't appear to be something you can look to for income. And that's what api was talking about when he said "In [Stallman's] world, the creators of things starve."

How so? The entirety of human history has shown us that we create no matter what. Art, music, tools, stories, technology, etc. Creators have been making (and eating) for eons, well before modern IP laws. Look at the patron model, or commission based production, used for centuries. Or look at creation during leisure time for leisure (and its close modern cousin, large portions of the App Store).

The absence of strong, modern IP laws has never meant (and never will) "creators of things starve". It may mean varying levels of overall creation, but it gets hard to quantify what that would mean, especially when many components of our current strong IP laws work against and damage creation of IP.

>Stallman can ignore this side of the equation because he is a tenured academic.

You kind of lost me with this attack on him. This is just a lazy cop-out that gets you out of considering the counterargument on its points and merits. You're not debating his argument, you're attacking his character. Incidentally though, he is getting paid, and he is using the ancient patron model which is entirely consistent with his views.

Here's a better idea: look at the actual work produced under this model. With a few notable exceptions, it's an endless parade of flattering portraits of rich people, glorified depictions the wars they won, politically slanted historic fictions used to justify their authority, and scenes from the religious stories they used to instill terror and obedience in the people they dominated ruthlessly.

In other words, if you actually understood what you were talking about, you'd know that art produced under the model you describe existed - above all - to project and protect the power of the people who paid for it. The beauty of the copyright systems is that it provided the first real break from a brutal and largely impoverished world in which a tiny handful of rich, powerful individuals (and the institutions they controlled) maintained exclusive control over what did and didn't get made.

Seriously, what else have you got? A compelling case for a return to the divine right of kings? Maybe you could defend the Church's Index of Banned Books while you're at it? Or remind us why burning witches was maybe a good thing after all?

Protip, dude: don't use history to support your arguments if you don't know the first thing about the history you're citing. The system defined by contemporary IP law is far from perfect, but the idea that it's worse that what it replaced is completely insane. Further progress means adapting IP law to the realities of the 21st Century, not saying "Screw it, let's just revert to what worked for the ruling class in 16th."

The historical art and creation of our race is so much more than that, and always has been. Come on. You know this. I'd wager that the vast majority of music, art, and technological process and creation for our species has not been for pay in service of the groups you described. To think that art has historically been created solely for the rich is rather absurd. It simply isn't true. From the first known cave paintings, to the blues, to free software, this has always happened and always will, regardless if the creator is getting paid by a customer (rich or poor), and organization, her community as a whole, or not paid at all.

>Seriously, what else have you got? A compelling case for a return to the divine right of kings? Maybe you could defend the Church's Index of Banned Books while you're at it? Or remind us why burning witches was maybe a good thing after all?

Woah. Ok, I'm out. I see what I'm dealing with now. Don't need a "protip" from this type of derailing commenter. Good day.

You'd win, but not for the reasons you imagine. You'd win because the vast majority of everything created by humans has been produced in the last century - and most of that has happened in countries with relatively strong democratic governance.

"To think that art has historically been created solely for the rich is rather absurd. It simply isn't true."

You're asserting this without any evidence, and doing do in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

"From the first known cave paintings, to the blues, to free software..."

Whoa, hold up, there's a HUGE gap between your first and second examples, and specifically, a gap where the evidence you're unable to cite should be.

Given the millennia-spanning history of civilization, expression that is legally protected from government interference is a very recent development, and even now, it's not one that's enjoyed worldwide. From ancient Sumer forward, you'll find that pretty much everything of note was created and controlled by the elite. And if not directly controlled, then certainly permitted only with their approval. Between the guilds that dominated production and the religious authorities who sanctioned their output, the power of art has - until very recently - been kept on a very short leash.

To a degree, I see how this validates your point in that it speaks to a large (and largely suppressed) desire to produce work that goes beyond the range of official sanction. And that's true of both work that gets supported in return for toeing a party line, and of work that gets banned for crossing it. But the desire to produce work is not the same as producing actual work. More powerful forms of creativity that went beyond folk art (largely restricted to song and dance) require advanced study and formal training, which absolutely and invariably took place under the watchful eye of the ruling class. Near-exclusive reliance on patronage not only provided a means for rewarding the useful and the loyal, it also provided a reliable means for starving the disloyal and disruptive. And I wasn't being flip by associating patronage with systems like the index of banned books and the divine right of kings. You can dismiss the broader context in which patronage thrived if you like, but that's no way to gain a comprehensive and accurate view of the subject.

Again, IP laws have never been perfect. But to the extent that they encapsulate the promise and power of democracy, they are tremendously instrumental in the explosion of human creativity that democratically ruled societies have been responsible for. Sure, there's always been some level of creativity present in human societies. But not until creative expression gained a measure of legal and economic independence, and people gained a strong measure of control over their governments, did the creative potential of humanity really lift off.

While IP laws are far from the only factor in this explosion, they're within the set of indispensable conditions that made the explosion possible in the first place. In the absence of a social contract that guarantees the physical well-being of every individual, regardless of the work they do (or don't) perform, IP laws provide an essential protection for the vast stores of materials and labor that go into the production of the most compelling works of art. Absent this protection (and general social support) the ability to control and advance the arts returns to the elite and their dependents. Invariably, this concentration of cultural power gets used to undermine the democratic institutions that exist to limit the concentration of political power in the hands of an otherwise unaccountable elite.

The absence of work from the historical record cannot be explained solely by the dearth of preservation or advertisement on the part of elites. It's also a product of active suppression by the elites of anything that may challenge - or even lead to a challenge - of their power and authority.

The best way to ensure that stuff like this never saw the light of day was to take full control of the means of production. This meant limiting access to both the tools of production and the training needed to use them well.

As far as our recent liberation goes, IP laws that allow creatives to finance their own production are only part of the picture. Other important innovations include the concept of human rights, the idea that freedom of expression is one of them, and legal systems that respect and protect those who engage in free expression.

None of this suggests that the desire to create freely and independently isn't a deeply felt part of the human condition. The point I'm making is that, until very recently, most people suffered under overbearing systems of governance that went out of their way to ensure that this creative desire was carefully controlled in the few cases where it wasn't brutally suppressed.

Saying the patronage system "worked" is a bit like justifying slavery on the grounds that mansions in the Antebellum South were remarkably beautiful, or that imposing the miserable conditions endured by peasants in pre-Revolution France was "redeemed" by the glories of Versailles.

It's possible to appreciate the artistic genius in work commissioned by monsters. But it's foolish to think that the mere existence of these transcendent efforts means we needn't worry about the conditions that produced them, or those who would allow these conditions to return.

GP correctly argued that artists have always created, whether or not they were granted rights under a system of copyright law. He did not focus on or advocate a return to the system of artist patronage from the 16th century.

Indeed, the whole point of tenure is to create working conditions that avoid the exceedingly well-known problems endemic to the patronage system.

Err, no, it only takes half an hour at most and a Xerox machine. It's much cheaper than buying it too. We used to do it all the time when I was in college, which helped a lot given that sometimes we needed books that were out of print.

And btw, the best thing about a printed book is that it's forever yours and you can rent it, burn it or copy it with no technical restrictions ;-)

> Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them

Welcome to the world of capitalism; supply and demand is a bitch, isn't it?

My problem with such an argument is that it tries to take a moral stand, whereas there's no morality in it, because being paid for shit is not a fundamental right. Plus in a world in which copyright terms keep getting extended such that Disney will never lose their rights for Mickey Mouse, some people find it hard to give a shit about copyrights.

But the freaking elephant in the room is that DRM does not protect the interests of "creators" and it does not stop people from pirating content. DRM only achieves two things - (1) lock-in for the company owning the platform (e.g. Amazon) and (2) milking loyal customers.

As an example, I'm resetting my phone like once every two months or so and reinstalling everything ... the Kindle app is now telling me that my books were downloaded on too many devices and so I can't download them. I can't "unregister" devices either, because this is simply a software bug. I then searched those books on torrent sites, found them, downloaded them and I'll never buy books from Amazon again.

IMO, a DRM bill of rights needs to exist to qualify for government protection. Data needs to be transferable FOR FREE to a new user. You can't shut down your DRM servers without first removing the DRM. You can't remotely change anything on a user’s system. Source code must be freely available for security researchers. DRM can only protect information not the operation of a physical device.

We had a very good system in the age of printed and recorded media. Not perfect, but good. We just have to figure out how to update it, or figure out a new one. Part of my point was that this hasn't happened yet, and I'm sad that few seem to be thinking about this from all sides snd really working on it.

So I think it would actually be reasonable for the DRM to protect a physical device; but the contract should be structured as such.

If I have title to my car and can dispose of it as I see fit; I shouldn't have to abide by DRM. If it is rented and doesn't actually belong to me, then I could see technological mechanisms such as limiting mileage or range as a valid way to enforce part of the contract.

What the line of appropriate vs. not appropriate is of course not necessarily black and white; but I do think John Deere is in the wrong here and the farmer is in the right.

However, I can see using something like DRM to protect information about how a rented device is operated or where it is being more reasonable. (You drove X miles, where speeding, did not change the oil on a leased car.)

This seemed like quite a lot until I divided it by the 25 years he's been living on it. £20k/year doesn't actually strike me as that much.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program

You should learn about investing.

If he invested the initial amount without spending it, a moderate dividend yield of 3% would make him $15000 a year. Add 25 years of dividend growth, and he is probably receiving $50000-$100000 today, or even more if he reinvseted some of the dividends.

In any case, it doesn't impact what I said. His gig is nice if you can get it, but I don't think the FSF can afford to pay everyone who works on GNU code.

I could go and lick the grass on my porch. I won't get paid for that. No matter how much I would like it.

Many things are just not profitable.

Unless you find other models, like patronizing

Patronizing like - https://www.patreon.com/ - or patronizing like, "offensively condescending" [1]. Based on context, I'm assuming the former, but patronizing is a auto-antonym, so it should be clarified [2].

[1] https://www.wordnik.com/words/patronizing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

And makes you think if it would or should go the same way of other non profitable but socially valuable activities, by the hands of non profit foundations and/or government support.

And if that would be a better or worse model than the current one.

Why can't John Deere make money selling tractors? The company was founded in 1837. Hasn't running a business for 178 years demonstrated that it is possible to eat and produce? Or is your comment unrelated to the article?

I do think that the cheapest way to get a tractor that would use the software would be to pay Deere for another tractor.

I also disagree with your statement that people only want creative content for free. I think Spotify and Netflix prove that people simply want the most convenient service, but old-fashioned companies keep making roadblocks that make legal content less convenient to use than pirated/illegal content.

> Stallman [...] is a tenured academic. It doesn't matter to him that nobody pays for his work.

The university does? I assume he can get fired if he doesn't do his job even if he has tenure.

> Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.

I think a lot of volunteers, e.g. a large amount of programmers who contribute to open source projects, do not think of themselves as or could be qualified as slaves.

There is no magic in making everything digital free - its just the way the universe works. Those things which can be trivially produced (digital copies) are tantamount to an infinite supply. In the case of limitless supply, prices will approach zero. Eventually the law will catch up with the rest of society.

Creatives will make money in other ways; there will always be writers, artists, poets, and hackers. People are compelled to create and share. They will not always be paid per unit of work after the fact.

Information is free if you sell it (in a book...in a prog...written on a stone tablet) you are letting others use it. Farmers are an easier target for them cause mostly they font own their land, or seed, now it would seem even their tractors. I think they have been hanging out too close to Monsanto and others whom make our litigious society possible while logically incongruent.

And if everyone is a creator then why how can everyone starve? It will only starve the ones who create poorly.

There is this meme that somehow not having copyright immediately implies no possible monetization strategy, and it needs to die.

Once most of the population realises the situation we've gotten ourselves into, perhaps things might change for the better. However, it's looking more and more like we're increasingly willing to sacrifice individual ownership rights and freedom for convenience or other things like security...

The closest we've gotten to a sort of "copyright revolution" might've been in the last decade when file sharing grew explosively and many people started thinking about the issue, but then the efforts of governments and corporations seem to have effectively suppressed that by leading consumers into using more convenient but less free systems.

IANAL, but legally, this has nothing to do with software. You can force buyers to agree to a license agreement to legally read your book. The right to first sale applies to copyright and trademark - it does not allow you to ignore license agreements. Obviously it's easier to enforce on software because you can execute DRM code on a device.

Blaming this on software or computers misses the underlying mechanism and focuses on the wrong thing. It is, and always has been, an issue of what we allow and don't allow in our legal system.

It will stop when people want it to stop.

All improvements thanks to our cyber-brains and cyborg bodies. So what if we can't live without high-level maintenance? We have nothing to complain about. It doesn't mean we've sold our souls to Section 9.

We do have the right to resign if we choose. Provided we give the government back our cyborg shells and the memories they hold. "

- Ghost In The Shell (1995) Script

For my money, the best non Miyazaki piece of art the genre ever produced.

Oh wait a minute, that's not at all what it was like. It's very easy to latch onto people like RMS who make everything seem so black and white, especially when they're older than you and can remember the "good old days" when everything was more civilized. These are all critical, important, vital issues that people should not let go of for one second and never stop thinking about. It's just unfortunate when people like RMS want to turn it into some grand good vs. evil narrative (frequently in which they see themselves in the hero/prophet role). It frames everyone with a differing or more nuanced opinion as someone who is not operating in good faith, which is just never good for anyone.

I don't think there's a person alive today who has all the answers about this stuff. There may not even be a correct or true or proper answer given the ways in which we've framed the debate, only a pseudoinverse solution that makes everyone the least unhappy on the whole. But we're long past letting any one person with their very, very, very specific ideology define that debate. I worry like hell about all this stuff, but the people going around saying "See?!? RMS was right!!!" might be counterproductive. It twists the debate back into "you're either with RMS or you're against him", and whatever his other good qualities may be, that's a tough pill to swallow for just about everyone. He approaches everything in the most fundamentalist way possible, which I've come to see as a sign of intellectual conceit rather than conviction.

aka: Ultimatist.

Just like the EFF, ACLU, NRA, NARAL, etc.

The job of the ultimatist is to expand the Overton Window, challenge assumptions, highlight hypocrisy, ask uncomfortable questions.

Agree or disagree, our public discourse would be less healthy without ultimatists like RMS.

If he had ever written anything in which he talked about how his views have evolved or changed over the course of his life, that would be one thing. But I don't think he's changed his mind about anything over the past 30 years, outside of becoming even more fundamentalist. I don't trust people who never change their minds about anything, especially those who think changing their mind is a sign of weakness. If they are widely known for declaring those who disagree with them as being evil or otherwise morally and ethically questionable, I not only don't trust them but start to think of them as toxic distractions to the real debates that we all should be having.

But he's very good at stating his own (biased) opinion.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNBMdDaYhZA

But it seems more important than ever that we have a way for individual users of software-controlled devices to move their "business logic" between standardized service vendors, whether that service is compute cycles in the cloud, or the physical work provided by a tractor.

Also, if the equipment is ultimately being rented, and the user owns the configuration, then the farmer could just rent another tractor (maybe from a competing tractor rental vendor), load his configuration on it, and keep the farm running.

Of course this is far from Stallman's vision of the everyman owning/modifying the code down to the bare metal, but it at least tries to shift the balance of control back toward the user.

I don't want it to stop - I think it's a good thing. By making a book impossible to pass from one person to another, the publisher is able to extract an income that is closer to the total benefit people derive from reading the book. In short: authors make more money. And so more books will be written, and readers will have a wider choice of better quality books.

And it's not just that digital books kill the secondary market for books - they also allow publishers to be highly discriminatory. If you are a woman in your 20s you pay full price for the new Taylor Swift biography, but a man in his 50s is offered a generous discount. For the latest Glenn Beck polemic the pricing structure is reversed.

So not only do publishers get a larger slice of the book-value pie, they are also able to grow the size of the pie. Magic!

These two statements are not logically connected. Price is controlled by supply and demand. If publishers are able to make more money from scarcity of books, it does not follow that authors are able to get more money unless there is also a scarcity of authors and a surplus of publishers.

When Glenn Beck writes his next book he will shop it to the publisher who pays him the most money - competition between publishers means the amount he receives will be proportional to the revenue the publisher can generate.

Every once in a while, I will gather the recent Kindle books I have purchased and attempt to convert them to PDF. This seems to work for most of them. IANAL, but my understanding is that if I have purchased a Kindle book then I can legally back it up as a PDF. Similarly, sometimes when I purchase a movie on DVD, I sometimes like a ripped copy on my laptop, especially for Qi Gong and Yoga lessons.

For expensive physical products, I would rather choose one with a high quality and a long lifespan with no computer in it at all. There are only a few left like Mercedes-Benz G-Class, Land Rover Defender, Hummer H1, Jeep Wrangler, Caterham 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_G-Class , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummer_H1 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_Wrangler , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterham_7 .

Watching the Top Gear Specials where they drive with old cars through foreign countries on crappy roads - I always think about how would a modern car survive that - it wouldn't. For example the Porsche 924 (1980s) was cars with a lots of computer chips, it was completely dead (the dashboard lighted like a Christmas tree, the windscreen wipers was the only thing working) after a few days driving through Africa.

Richard Stallman was right. The GNU (L)GPL 2+ is a very good choice for open source projects - at least for bigger (for smaller BSD/MIT is good too).

"The family farmer who owns this tractor is a friend of mine. He just wanted a better way to fix a minor hydraulic sensor. Every time the sensor blew, the onboard computer would shut the tractor down. It takes a technician at least two days to order the part, get out to the farm, and swap out the sensor. So for two days, Dave’s tractor lies fallow. And so do his fields.

Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave’s sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor’s highly proprietary computer system—the tractor’s engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast."

Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/new-high-tech-farm-equipment-ni...

So basically, the concerns are very reasonable - operations cannot rely on systems that are put out of commission without a way to fix relatively minor issues on the spot.

While the system is trying to protect the farmer for liability purposes, if that farmer overrides the safe guard, liability shifts. The choice should be with the farmer and not John Deere lawyers.

If John Deere is only willing to sell lifetime licenses to operate their vehicles, thus putting the farmer at risk in ways like you described, why do farmers still buy these "licenses"?

Naively, they must represent some advantage (despite their shortcomings), otherwise John Deere wouldn't be able to sell these things.

[1] http://www.tennesseetractor.com/assets/Uploads/jd-timeline.j...

- http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski

- http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac

We'll see if farmers really care about this though, or whether it turns out to be something like "Replaceable Batteries" or "SD Flash slots" on smart phones.

The Wired article mentions that some farmers are preferring to buy old tractors without the electronics. This demand increases the value for the used market and should depress the value of new tractors. There will likely be a growth in the business of maintaining old tractors and, potentially, enough public awareness of the benefits of tractors without electronics that another manufacturer can step in.

Or it might fizzle. Markets don't solve every problem, but they usually solve the problems people are willing to pay for.

Also, I haven't bought a new car in many years. Is there something like a EULA buried in the small print? And I don't imagine buyers on the secondary market sign anything. Or will it become illegal to sell used cars because the software license doesn't allow for transfer?

In the EU? Only if TTIP gets signed.

There's a lot of strength to being incumbent in both of these areas.

The manufacturer has to have the deep pockets and stomach for a protracted battle - lots of folks "bleed green" and will only buy Deere. Deere is everywhere in the countryside - big marketing campaigns.

Deere and others also have large dealer networks. That is where the sales are made. Many of these dealers have been around for a really long time and have all of the customer access. You'd have to break into the network somehow.

You'd have to not only be able to make it, but have the cash on hand to sustain more than a few years of incredibly low sales and lack of distribution.

Long term, they may do significant damage, but it will take time to erode the built-up good will.

I'm just guessing here, but I know Deere produces some fairly sophisticated software that takes over head photos of crops and they have various services that offer advice on how to best farm different parts of a farmer's land. Some of that software interacts with their farm equipment (like it can signal the onboard software to maybe work more slowly in particularly dense parts of a crop and stuff like that.) I could see them trying to somehow protect that software investment and treat it as a lock-in where the device owners may want to use that service with other brands of equipment or something. From what I gather, it's a non-trivial amount of software that they've built that has some significant value.

They do. The difference is that farmers are far more likely to attempt a fix on their machine than the average car user. Also, since farmers use their tractors more than the average user uses their car, a tractor is part of a system, while a car typically is the system. As such, there are a lot of parts to integrate with and as a result, more places where the system can break.

> If John Deere is only willing to sell lifetime licenses to operate their vehicles, thus putting the farmer at risk in ways like you described, why do farmers still buy these "licenses"?

Because John Deere has a monopoly.

> Naively, they must represent some advantage (despite their shortcomings), otherwise John Deere wouldn't be able to sell these things.

Yes, that is naive. If you look to capitalism to solve the problems of people at the bottom, you'll almost always be disappointed.

That goes without saying that this issue is bigger than the tractor market. Car manufacturers are hopping on board and there are even fewer options for cars without protected computers in them. This issue is only getting more pressing as more daily objects become integrated with computer systems.

The whole OP is disingenuous - the issue is not who 'owns' the tractor. The issue is with the licence of the software that runs it. That doesn't change anything about the ownership of the tractor. Shoddy reporting, designed to appeal to the prejudices of their audience.

If the system is so unreliable there are many other farm tractor manufacturers who can step in and likely are already exploiting the issues John Deere has.

If anything, perhaps lemon laws could be applied to farm machinery and written to be as X number of days across a calendar year. the nice thing about farming today is your likely to have online resources, places where word of this problem can travel fast enough to make a manufacture take notice

what you say makes sense, but meanwhile Dave is still standing in his field with a useless machine and lots of work to do.

If your tractor is broken down and you need to bale that hay that's been drying in the fields today before the rain comes tomorrow and ruins it, you're screwed unless you can find a nearby farmer to help.

It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.

I don't have any sympathy for what John Deere is trying to to in using the DMCA to restrict how people repair their own tractors.

But the legal issues need to be better delineated than this article attempts to do.

1. John Deere does not "own" your tractor when you buy it from them and it is not asserting that it does. Software is automatically protected by copyright. It is a tangible form of expression of something that is creative and, the way copyright law works, a developer of software does not need to do anything except his normal work in order to gain copyright protection. You code it, you own it. That is the default. If you code it while being paid by someone else as his employee hired to invent, then that someone else owns it. Or if you code it as a work for hire paid by someone else, again, that someone else owns it. The situations vary. But, almost universally, for commercial, proprietary software, the customer almost never owns the software he uses when buying and operating a piece of hardware operated by that software. We all take this for granted when we buy a computer or mobile device. We own the hardware but not the software. We license the software and that is it. That license gives us a right to use the software for its intended purposes but it is almost invariably accompanied by terms that restrict us as consumers from reverse engineering the code or otherwise using the code for any purpose beyond the limited scope of what the license itself allows. For example, we cannot reverse engineer the software to attempt to create a competitive form of software product. People may have philosophical objections to this - usually falling under the "all information ought to be free" rubric - but, unless and until that philosophy prevails and works to change the law, that is by no means what the law is today. Today, when you have commercial software, you have copyright protection and hence a lack of ability to use or do anything else with that software without the permission of the copyright holder. And that means a license.

2. What John Deere is doing with its tractors is not claiming ownership of them once you buy them. Just as when you buy a Mac, Apple is telling you, you own the hardware and you have a license to use the software during the life of the product, so too John Deere is saying the same thing with its tractors. You own the tractor and you can do what you want with it until the product dies but, in once it dies, you have no further license to use the software on anything else besides that product. That is the legal effect of what a license does. There is nothing whatever controversial about this unless you have a philosophical resistance to the very idea of copyright (I realize many people do, of course). Under the law, however, John Deere is claiming nothing more here than what every computer manufacturer has claimed since the beginning of modern computing. To say, as this article does, that John Deere is claiming to own your tractor is wrong. Since the author is hardly ignorant of this, it seems the above statement is inserted for emotional effect and not as part of any reasoned argument.

3. All that said, copyright law is not absolute and never has been. When one gets a copyright, it is time-limited (or at least should be, notwithstanding the absurdly long extensions granted in recent years under the Bono Act, etc.). It also is not absolute even while the rights exist. The huge category limiting its effect is that of fair use. In some cases, public policy requires that certain uses of otherwise copyrighted materials be permitted regardless of what a copyright holder might claim. Classic cases include digital video recording, select permissible copying from books, etc. In the case of the John Deere software, and that of every other vehicle manufacturer that seeks to monopolize the market for repair of its vehicles through use of the DMCA's non-circumvention rules, the issue is not whether its software ought to be subject to copyright protection but rather whether they can use that protection to prevent people from conducting basic repairs on the vehicles they own. And that is a public policy question.

4. So, what is the proper public policy: should the DMCA be allowed to be used as a legal sledgehammer by which manufacturers can bludgeon owners and thereby force them to do their repairs in ways that lock them forever in to the manufacturer? It would certainly seem not. Indeed, when framed in this way, the manufacturers' position becomes extreme and even outrageous. Well, EFF, et al. are doing a good job of arguing this in the relevant places to try to shape the law fairly on this point. They are to be commended for this and, in this sense, what John Deere is arguing is pretty despicable.

5. But none of this means that they own your tractor after you buy it. Nor does it mean that copyright doesn't apply to the software they develop. It can and it does. It is just that copyright has limits and, when pushed beyond those limits, loses its salutary purpose and becomes obnoxious and damaging.

6. As a final point, nothing in John Deere's position challenges the idea of "ownership" as we know it. By framing the issue in this way, this article (in my view) tries to play on common sympathies but does so in a very misleading way. I believe this only weakens what is otherwise a sound position on preventing misuse of the DMCA. It also misstates the law pretty badly. So here are my two cents trying to correct this.

>Generally, tie-in sales provisions are not allowed. Such a provision would require a purchaser of the warranted product to buy an item or service from a particular company to use with the warranted product in order to be eligible to receive a remedy under the warranty. The following are examples of prohibited tie-in sales provisions.[1]

Regardless of how the DMCA arguments play out, at least the automakers will have difficulties moving forward as there is a long fought battle over not releasing service information on in-car computer and diagnostic information to third-party repair service provides. There hasn't been legislation over the issue because automakers volunteered to release information on service and tools required to service in car computer systems.[2] It would most likely be easy to build a legal case against an auto company that required you to take your warrantied car to a franchised dealership for warrantied replacement of a defective circuit board. So in a not too hard to imagine hypothetical scenario where a bug in the car's cam timing software cause mechanical failure, but the auto manufacturer refuses to sell the replacement part (replacement software) or tools required to perform service to third-party service providers because of software licensing, would that not fall under Magnuson-Moss Act if the repair would be warrantied?

[1]https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/bus...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Vehicle_Owners'_Right_to_...

[edit] spelling/format

These are giga-corporations who are 'family owned' in name only. If they don't rent, they operate that machine for a few years, play the tax game, and trade it even-money for a new one. To them, ownership doesn't matter. Their service contracts with implement dealers let them not worry about who owns what. All they care about is whether or not it works.

(Off topic now) Between this and the stupidly high price for land, it's small farmers who are getting left in the dust. I say this in every thread related to farming; I am in my early 30's and I guarantee I live to see the death of the actual family farm.

People own their own tractors and share time to get things done, otherwise you'd have to own all of the equipment (which is only justified when you've got a giant factory farm). More of the small farms own new tractors, as the 70s era tractors have been overhauled to the point of junk.

This is the current status of small town Iowa at least.

The 13 farmers that lived and worked on my road when I was a kid are ALL gone. City folks rent those houses; corporations farm those fields.

(Hm. Random calculation: 120 bushels of corn at 56 lbs per bushel, per acre, is about 11 metric tons per hectare[1]. According to the FDA[2], the US average projected production for 2014/2015 is 10.7 metric tons (the world average is about half that), so your field is pretty decent.)

[1] Thank you, units! You have: (181 * 56) pounds per acre You want: metrictons per hectare * 11.360947 / 0.088020829

[2] http://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/production.pdf

The average person might pay 4.5% to 7% for that $400,000 property. A sizable corporation can borrow for 20 years at half those rates.

Better yet, the big corporation has cash reserves and cash flow from their big existing operation, and can buy the property outright. That property then yields, say, 5% per year on the cash invested - which obliterates what all corporations are getting on cash or cash equivalents.

The corporate farm can redirect 100% of that property's production toward paying for the property and farming costs, without harming itself in the process. If done correctly this becomes a perpetually expanding machine, the same premise that has led to consolidation in other previously highly fractured industries. Warren Buffett (among others) is presently attempting to do this in auto dealerships for example.

It's the same reason Costco can operate quite successfully on a 2.x% operating profit margin, whereas most businesses will tip over rapidly with that slim of a buffer.

The small farmer will constantly struggle to not drown by comparison.

They don't have to pay for a house per 40 acres.

120 bushels per acre is about 7.5 tons per hectare, which probably makes it a bit low for economic farming.

     You have: (120 * 56) pounds per acre
     You want: metrictons per hectare
	     * 7.5321198
	     / 0.13276475

We still have family farms in North Dakota, so I guess it might be a regional thing. Also, for those counting incorporations (like a couple of newspapers), you have to be stupid not to incorporate.

kudos to your Dad

You invest everything you have into a business that will return you very little, at least in the start. As you start to grow you put your profits into growth. Finally, as you reach retirement age the debts are hopefully paid off and you are actually making money for the first time. You're also sitting on millions of dollars worth of assets that are now fully in your name. When you are ready to retire, you sell it all.

In other words: You live in poverty over your working career so that you can cash out later in life, while hopefully not going bust in the meantime. The profitability of the business is dependant on the market and the weather, but even more dependant on what stage your business is at. Early stage businesses are apt to lose money most years, but late stage businesses should make money most years.

A big corp can calculate differently from your small farmers. It's OK to them if the field turns profitable finally in 20 or 30 years because they have enough other sources of income to pay for the mortgage (or buy the field out of pocket).

The small farmer on the other hand would be bankrupt by then.

It seems like you could make the mortgage if you can grow specialty crops - http://www.profitableplantsdigest.com/10-most-profitable-spe...

Also, indoor growing is said to make certain crops grow 5x faster with 5x less resources. Here's one company that seems to be growing (they're opening a large facility in my state) - http://aerofarms.com/

Corn -> corn mash -> fermented corn mash -> ethanol -> bourbon -> aged bourbon

40 acres of corn gets you nowhere. 40 acres of corn converted to bourbon gets you generational wealth.

And farmers still talk. If Farmer Brown and Farmer Ted are sittin' down at the local terminal having their coffee they talk about their equipment. Word of mouth still matters huge in the areas I work in.

Small town Illinois is similar to Iowa apparently, except for the last section. We do share labor, and rent/trade labor for the use of large machinery. But, the market for older machinery is still very strong. I bought 2 1970's masseys at auction last year, and one small mid-90's JD this year. The bids were competitive, but the price was fair.

Which is why they care more about this issue than someone without a mega-tractor. These vehicles need to be operational when they're called upon, every minute of downtime costs a substantial amount of money that adds up incredibly fast. Sure, they have service contracts but waiting on a technician and waiting even longer for a replacement part is out of the question. A broken sensor will disable a tractor even if it would run perfectly fine without it. Mega farms care about losing the ability to improvise repairs in the field and/or take the risk of long term damage if its outweighed by the cost of the short term downtime.

I've experienced the results of an ECU that can disable a perfectly functional vehicle. I had a ride day with one of our service technicians in our Class 7 truck. The "Check Engine" light had been coming on intermittently throughout the day but we ignored it as it came on inconsistently and we were already 2 hours behind. On our way back to our branch the light came on again at highway speed and 30 seconds later the engine went into "limp home" mode and then shut itself off. We came to a rest on the side of the highway, tilted slightly into a ditch. After calling the local service manager we were informed that the head gasket had blown and the last technician to drive the truck was supposed to refill the coolant and let us know about the issue. We hiked down the road with the empty coolant bottles the last tech left for us and brought back 20 gallons of water, filling the expansion tank. So we should be good as long as we kept tabs on the water level, right? Nope. The water level sensor was placed in in a position where we couldn't fill the tank high enough for it to read the tank as full due to the angle of the truck in the ditch. It wouldn't start without a "safe" reading from the sensor and we couldn't level the truck out without it's own power. That sensor left us stranded for 3 hours until a repair truck arrived and had us running in less than 10 minutes by jacking up the low side of the truck. Now imagine losing half a day during harvest for the same bullshit reason.

…leading us back to why the sensors try to stop you completing the destruction of your engine. No common sense.

The issue in the article is starting to hit medium sized farms. When old tractors broke they pulled them into the shop and fixed them. Now they can't even diagnose without having the local dealer come out. During harvest time a tractor being down for 12 hours is HUGE. Like make it or break your year huge.

Even the "medium sized" tractors require a service tech with a laptop to come out for almost everything. Want to shift around your planting? Tech. Get a new field? Tech. Changing the type of seeds? tech. Farmers HATE those techs.

Also this issue is a HUGE issue in cars and other consumer things. Which is where it will probably be fought in the end. If I buy a car today, in 20 years it's pretty assured I will NOT be able to find a computer or any information about the ECU on how to tune the engine or use the ECU to diagnose drive train issues. They're hiding the ECU specs in the name of safety and emissions. In the end it's hurting consumers and shops in a big way.

Also, small farmers buy a lot of tractors second, third, fourth-hand. Many are still running 50 years later. This is as much an attempt to kill the secondary market and the right to resell.

Without being able to buy and fix up used farm parts/equipment, many (including my family) would be fiscally unable to farm - full stop.

It can make the difference between a successful harvest or not; but neither strategy is a guarantee. As an example, if you have your cotton defoliated and then your harvester goes on strike for two or more days, any rain in the interim will destroy your crop.

Hiring a farmhand is cheap. Really, they work for almost nothing. But; the ones who know how to run the equipment are busy at harvest time.

But the individuals who have the power, money, and influence to do actually change anything are the large-scale farmers. They are not invested in changing the system; it works for them.

A typical small farmer in Saskatchewan can harvest 100-200 acres of wheat by himself on a single day using a modern combine harvester. Manual harvesting is not an option.

The average Sask farm was 1668 acres as of 2011.

Only the 'slick' farmers (you know, them city folks) or large businesses that are 'family farms' in name only are incorporated.

But it seems unlikely to approach the yields of annual monoculture farming. (One quote: "The biggest difference, however, comes from considering perennial cereals. Most of the cereals that people eat (such as wheat, rice, oats, and corn/maize) are grown in annual plantings and often in monocultures. Since cereals account for at least half of dietary energy world-wide, converting that production to perennial polycultures with mixed intercropping would be a significant change in worldwide agriculture.") That's a bad thing; I'd like to see more use of these techniques, for all of the primary benefits mentioned in the paper. (The yield thing for subsistence farmers is a secondary benefit.)

[1] And it would help if I added the link: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/... [PDF]

The fruits tend to be more of a mixed bag that is best distributed & consumed locally.

> What would doing that for all food do to the price of food?

Note that conventional petrol agriculture is heavily subsidized. Removing the subsidy will increase the price of food. It will favor small scale, high nutrition, gardening/farming. It will reduce waste as well.

Humorously, I grew up in the Texas panhandle, an area with significant agricultural production due to modern irrigation techniques. There aren't a whole lot of fruits grown there, though. The irrigation requirements would be truly ridiculous.

Favoring direct intervention to fix the actual problem should be axiomatic, really.

The more food we can make per unit resource, the more food we have, given that resources are finite.

Giving the poor more money does nothing to change that.

No one in the US is starving because we can't produce enough food. People starve because their access to the food is artificially hindered. In fact, we're producing so much food the the US government pays farmers to not produce food so that prices will remain high enough to make a profit.

In the real world operating under market rules, there's not one rule that determines how much food we have. It's a function of how much you invest in the operation -- land, tractors, farm labor, irrigation, livestock feed, food processing, et cetera. People know how much food to produce and how to produce it because of PRICES. Higher food prices are encourage people to reduce food waste (by making it more expensive, making concepts like "leftovers" or "canning" more attractive) or divert resources towards producing food (e.g. by starting new farms, buying better farming equipment, or starting a garden in their backyard). It also discourages inefficient forms of feeding people by raising the price (e.g. making meat more expensive because it takes a boatload of resources to feed a cow). Lower food prices reduce the profit of farming, discouraging the over-exploitation of the land or over-investment in expensive capital like tractors.

In a subsidized environment, the real cost of things is detached from the sticker price at the supermarket. Food is still expensive, but it's not the consumer who's paying for it -- it's the taxpayer. So farms buy more heavy equipment than would naturally be efficient and burn more gasoline than is efficient, food processors waste more food than is efficient, people toss food in the trash more than is efficient, people grow rice in the California desert instead of importing it from somewhere that actually has rain, and midwestern farms destroy more prairie lands and Nature than is efficient, because why not? Taxpayers are paying for it, all crazy-indirectly, and they'd have to go through Congress and go up against big agribusiness lobbyists to get any of their money back. (Then the taxpayers find that they can't pay for other nice things they might want, because of the money going to taxes, and the economy suffers.)

By giving people who need money, money, instead of giving producers a subsidy, you avoid all that. Everyone eats, farms produce the right amount of food with a sane amount of tractors, big factory farms aren't given money that funky forest-culture farms aren't and so each style of farm prevails on its own merits, people with backyards start gardens and make preserves, et cetera.

TLDR: screw with the market's price mechanisms and you screw everything up

Postscript: This is all the fault of the FDR administration when you get down to it.

Subsidies (as they are practiced now) encourage non-sustainable and wasteful food production.

Could technology ever give one company such a great advantage that they could buy land at a price which would be a great loss to everyone else? The answer could be less about technology and more about the subsidized enforcement of intellectual property law and the strength or weakness of anti-trust law.

We look at this from an IP right/wrong standpoint, but a lot of moral questions regarding food production sit outside that realm as long as many people are either not getting enough food or getting too much of food that is damaging their bodies.