Home Tech FTC Lawsuit Against John Deere Is a Possible Tipping Point for More Repairable Hardware

FTC Lawsuit Against John Deere Is a Possible Tipping Point for More Repairable Hardware

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FTC Lawsuit Against John Deere Is a Possible Tipping Point for More Repairable Hardware

Today, USA The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against farm equipment maker Deere & Company (makers of the iconic John Deere green tractors, combines and lawnmowers) citing its long-standing reluctance to prevent its customers from fixing their own machines.

“Farmers depend on their farm equipment to make a living and feed their families,” FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan wrote in a statement. statement next to the complete complaint. “Unfair repair restrictions can mean farmers face unnecessary delays during tight planting and harvest periods.”

The FTC’s main complaint here centers on a software problem. Deere imposes limitations on its operating software, meaning that certain functions and calibrations of its tractors can only be unlocked by mechanics who have the correct digital key. Deere only licenses those keys to its authorized dealers, which means farmers often can’t take their tractors to more convenient outside mechanics or simply fix a problem themselves. The lawsuit would require John Deere to stop the practice of limiting the repair features its customers can use and make them available to those outside of official dealerships.

Kyle Wiens is the CEO of the repair defense retailer. iFixit and an occasional WIRED contributor who first wrote about John Deere’s reluctant repair tactics in 2015. In an interview today, he noted how frustrated farmers get when they try to fix something that’s gone wrong, only to run into Deere policy.

“When you have something that doesn’t work, if you’re 10 minutes from the store, it’s not a big deal,” Wiens says. “If the store is three hours away, as it is for farmers in most of the country, it’s a huge problem.”

The other difficulty is that US copyright protections prevent anyone other than John Deere from creating software that counteracts the restrictions the company has placed on its platform. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 states that individuals cannot legally counter technological measures that fall under their protection. John Deere equipment is subject to that copyright policy.

“Not only are they being anti-competitive, it’s literally illegal to compete with them,” Wiens says.

Deere in the headlights

Wiens says that even though there has been a decade of opposition to John Deere from farmers and repairability advocates, customers who use the company’s machines haven’t seen much benefit from all that talk.

“Things haven’t really gotten better for farmers,” says Wiens. “Even with all the noise around right to repair over the years, nothing has materially changed yet for farmers on the ground.”

He believes this lawsuit against Deere will be different.

“This has to be what does it,” says Wiens. “The FTC will not reach a settlement until John Deere makes the software available to the public. “This is a step in the right direction.”

Deere’s reluctance to make its products more accessible has infuriated many of its customers and even yielded generally bipartisan results. congressional support for repairability in the agricultural space. The FTC alleges that John Deere also violated legislation approved by the Colorado government in 2023 that requires agricultural equipment sold in the state to make operating software accessible to users.

“Deere’s illegal business practices have inflated farmers’ repair costs and degraded their ability to obtain timely repairs,” the lawsuit reads.

Deere & Company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Right to Repair Campaign at advocacy group US PIRG, wrote a statement praising the FTC’s decision. He thinks this case, no matter how it turns out, will be a positive step for the right to repair movement more broadly.

“I think this discovery process will paint a picture that will make it very clear that your team is programmed to monopolize certain repair functions,” Proctor tells WIRED. “And I hope Deere fixes the problem or pays the price. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. But this is a very important milestone, because once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no way to put it back in.”

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