Uncle Sam backs right-to-repair battle against Big Ag's John Deere The US Department of Justice on Tuesday asked an Illinois federal court not to dismiss antitrust litigation against agricultural equipment maker Deere & Company for allegedly trying to monopolize the repair of its products. The case, filed June 1, 2022, represents a consolidation of six lawsuits against Deere & Company, maker …
It is standard journalism terminology. It means they were asked for a comment, but there was not much time between when they were asked and when the article was published. It is possible they will return a comment post-publication, in which case the article will be updated. The text serves to tell the reader that John Deere has not declined to comment, just not commented yet, so if you want to see their comment, you may want to check back in a day or so.
Besides needing to take the tractor to a John Deere dealer to even get "check engine light" stle codes read out, they also use DRM (rights restriction chips). Oddly, you can actually get grey market eastern European ECU software and then use free software for diagnosis and buy off the shelf parts. (For example, buy a $70 Bendix fuel injector instead of paying John Deere like $500+ for the same injector with a rights restriction chip on it). Of course John Deere would claim it's black market software, but once you own your tractor you can do whatever the f' you want to it so they can void the warranty but othewise don't get to have a say in it.
The US Gov't passed rules in the mid or late 1970s restricting car companies from this kind of shenanigans (requiring all parts and service to come from the dealership, restricting non-dealerships from getting diagnostic info from the vehicle anjd from getting vehicle service manuals and specs, etc.) For cars that includes that car companies cannot void the warranty for using aftermarket parts (of course they're off the hook if a low quality aftermarket part directly caused whatever you are going in to have repaired, but other than that...) iI don't think anyone back then imagined a tractor company would decide to try the same type of BS.
I don't see why you think this strange, is it not that any business in any sector, once it gets big enough, tries, increasingly skillfully and efficiently, to maximise profits by channelling all real, possible (and potential) revenue streams straight back to mothership? DRM is nothing personal, just business, i.e. more money for me and FUCK YOU users-losers.
OK, fair enough, SOME profits need to be invested in the lobbying, but it is a good investment, pays off. Usually.
Remember that the "R" in DRM means Restrictions, not Rights.
Digital Restrictions Management. There, it does not sound so benign does it? Of course, if the topic does come up, just remember to be a PITA and spell it out in full. "DRM" can gloss it over, say "Digital Restrictions Management" and people take more notice.
Maybe they are selling the tractors at very low margins and making most or their profit on spares, repairs and servicing. If they lose this case then, in order to maintain their margins, they might have to increase the prices of the tractors to a point where they look expensive compared to their competitors.
For general market items like cars, "repaired by anyone" makes sense.
For industrial and farming equipment I expect a lot of customers just go to the dealer anyway [the way that managers "buy microsoft"].
It's the independent and family-owned farmer who would be hit the hardest by these practices. Corporate farmers just collect their pay and let management deal with the upkeep.
@bombastic bob
I'm in UK & live in a rural area, a lot of small farmers still around (wrong landscape for huge cereal farms, so mainly livestock) - most of the farmers have the mechanical skills to keep their kit running & do a lot of repairs / fitting of replacements themselves. It saves them money & its part of being a small farmer. Obviously for some things they have to go to a third party for repairs, but that's fairly uncommon...
Though don't know any farmers that use John Deere kit (mainly MF users round here) so no idea what the service / repair lock-in scenario is in UK for John Deere kit.
"Wouldn’t you sell more base units if they could be repaired by anyone?"
If there are only a few manufacturers of such things anyway, you're likely to sell a lot of units whatever you do. Unlike cars where you have a bunch of choices if you decide a specific company's not good enough, there aren't so many options when you need a specific piece of agricultural equipment, especially if finances aren't unlimited and you need to care about which one is cheaper or better supported in the short term. It's when they already have this barrier to losing sales that they start to expand where they hope to get profit from the buyers.
Wouldn’t you sell more base units if they could be repaired by anyone?
Two problems with that ...
The first, already mentioned here, is that the razor blade principle applies - JD make a lot of profit on after-sales services and allowing other people to provide those directly eats into ongoing profits. Don't forget, they make a profit once when they sell the machine, they make profits every time that machine needs a service of any kind.
The second is that you assume there's a healthy competitive market - in many places there isn't. Agricultural machinery is a relatively niche market, and not many players. And while I've not heard anything to suggest it's happening, I can't help thinking that the other players in the market will be planning much the same sort of things if they see JD get away with it. And JD are big enough that I suspect they could easily play the Standard Oil or IBM moves to rid any particular area of competing dealers.
A harvester, so some other specialised piece of plant, generally cant get anywhere outside of where it is operating under its own steam, and certainly not in a timely fashion. It most likely wouldn't even be registered to drive on the road.
So, my Ag X shits itself on my farm, and I need to ring Mr and Mrs Deere to come out and plug their laptop into it to see what's wrong with the thing? Then they need to come back later to fix it when the parts needed arrive?
Have I misunderstood something?
"It most likely wouldn't even be registered to drive on the road."
Actually, yes, almost all farm equipment is allowed to be operated on the road here in the States.
"I need to ring Mr and Mrs Deere to come out and plug their laptop into it to see what's wrong with the thing? Then they need to come back later to fix it when the parts needed arrive?"
No. You are expected to put the broken contraption onto a heavy equipment flatbed, take it to the nearest JD stealership (100 miles away), where it will be diagnosed. Eventually. Then you wait 4 to 6 weeks for parts to come in, and then another 4 to 6 weeks for them to schedule a "repair technician" to fix it. Then you drive back with your heavy-equipment flatbed, pay the exorbitant cost of the part replacement and threaten mayhem until they remove the "storage fee" for the time that your gear sat on their lot due to their incompetence, load it up, and tow it home ... having missed the harvest window by 8 to 12 weeks. All for a broken part that you could have bought at the nearest automotive store and replaced in the field, if JD's all-knowing computer would allow it.
And THEN, the following year, the VERY SAME part dies again, right at the start of harvest, starting the cycle all over again.
True story. Happened to a friend of mine. The part was a fuel pump. He no longer has any green equipment. Sold the lot.
The alternative being that you ring the dealer and wait (watching the perfect harvest weather go by) while they find time to send a guy round with some spanners - and of course, be handsomely charged for the privilege. Then much the same thing, wait for parts, for for another visit, and hope the right parts have come to fix the problem. Meanwhile it's now pisersisting down and no chance of harvesting for a while.
But, speaking from my experience of rural small farming in Cumbria (UK), that isn't how it works. We have MF, JD, and IH main dealers nearby, plus a number of independent repair shops. Come harvest time, if something breaks then their guys are generally good to come out - basically it's all down to how many breakdowns they are already attending to. I recall on one occasion the guy turned up well into the evening in his own car, with his significant other with him - so last job of the day then he can get down to some ... presumably canoodling. Put another way, when the demand is there, their guys work long days to keep people running. They seem to be pretty good with parts as well. As to whether the new JD stuff has the same crippleware as the US stuff, I have no idea - I'm more used to working with older stuff, in some cases older than I am and I'm no spring chicken !
and certainly not in a timely fashion
As a young'un, I've driven a harvester on a paved public road. While I could have driven it faster (than 15 MPH? it had no speedometer), I dared not do so because the to-and-fro rocking on those huge, low-pressure, bouncy tires threatened to dig the harvesting head into the pavement (yes, I had raised the head to its upper limit). The machine's owner would have been a tad dismayed had that happened.
(Icon for "No Firmware Inside".)
"Have I misunderstood something?"
You mean other than the fact that the US's legal system is so broken in favor of the the big players, that even John Deere's yellow and green colors are 'trademarked', and can't be used by anyone else selling an even remotely-agricultural product? (Just ask the guy who tried selling spraying equipment painted an insipid version of yellow and green. Ever wonder why you can't buy a yellow multimeter for electrical work? Because Fluke has 'tradenarked' that color, in that application, for its use only)
Nope.
You understand perfectly.
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"There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress."--Mark Twain
In general, you can't trademark a single colour, so hard to stop someone selling "JD Green" (or JD Yellow) paint. What they can do is trademark the use of Green plus Yellow in the market of agricultural machinery. Hmm, I mistyped that as Greed and Yellow - seems an appropriate error !
So if someone tried to sell agricultural machinery that's painted any combination of green and yellow where those colours are remotely similar to JD colours, then they'll be infringing on JD's trademark - and JD seem like the sort of company that would take a dim view of that. But have green without yellow, or yellow without green, hard to make a trademark infringement case stick - other than by picking on someone without the cashflow to fight it.
In the same way, Apple have a trademark for the set of colours they used to have in their logo, as well as the "Apple with a bite missing" logo itself. Not for any of the single colours, but for the set of colours.
I work with contractors in the construction / repair industry. Almost every one of them runs with equipment that's 20 to 30 years old or older. One of them was beaming one time about how he was about to get ahold of a "new" piece of equipment that was going to be built around a re-built diesel engine from the 1960s or 1970s. Every time I've asked those contractors why they keep running with old engines and equipment, they say pretty much the same thing: they are able to repair the old stuff themselves the vast majority of the time. They can do this because they usually have at least one or two mechanics on staff to repair and maintain their equipment (but who can also step in as extra labor on jobs when they get very busy). For those times when the contractor can't repair the old equipment themselves, they are able to take it to an independent repair shop where it usually gets fixed relatively quickly at reasonable cost. However, when the newer stuff breaks, it requires them to haul it to a dealer, wait forever, and pay an arm and a leg for the repair. Time is money for them in a big way. It's not unusual for their contracts to have timeframes with bonuses for finishing early and major penalties for finishing late.
John Deere may be the target because the market they're trying to screw is well organized (there's a very large "John Deere Owners Group" in the US, for example) but they're not alone. Everyone's at it -- you a company and you're looking for revenue streams so selling features through software subscriptions is an obvious course of action. Car manufacturers are now getting in on the act. Its been difficult to maintain control of physical spare parts for them (although a surprising amount of your car can't be changed legally from how its delivered from the factory/dealer)(YMMV depending on where you live) but as a lot of a modern vehicle is electronic the scope for maintaining control over it widens considerably.
The result is that there's a robust market in used equipment, especially 'late used' -- modern enough to be a decent design but lacking the full electronics and always on connectivity of the latest products.
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