John Deere’s repair fake-out

So many strings attached.

Last week, a seeming miracle came to pass: John Deere, the Big Ag monopolist that — along with Apple — has led the Axis of Evil that killed, delayed and sabotaged dozens of Right to Repair laws, sued for peace, announcing a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to make it easier for farmers to fix their own tractors:

https://www.fb.org/files/AFBF_John_Deere_MOU.pdf

This is a move that’s both badly needed and long overdue. Deere abuses copyright law to force farmers to pay for official repairs — even when the farmer does the repair. That’s possible thanks to a practice called VIN locking, in which engine parts come with DRM that prevents the tractor from recognizing them until they pay hundreds of dollars for a John Deere technician to come to their farm and type an unlock code into the tractor’s console:

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

Like all DRM, VIN locks are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that criminalizes distributing tools to bypass “access controls,” even if you do so for a lawful purpose (say, to fix your own tractor using a part you paid for). Violations of DMCA 1201 carry a penalty of 5 years in prison and…