[grumblenum]

Exclusionary rights to make, use or redistribute a thing. I’m under the impression that patent rights allow one to sue to prevent others from making, using or redistributing a thing without a contract or license from the patent holder. I would call that protection. Maybe it’s different where you live.

[Yaa101]

He was talking about protecting a trade secret, patents are about giving up your trade secret to have a monopoly for a given time. This enabled society in the past to build complex systems by standing on each others shoulders. The problem with patents nowadays is the way they are validated, they used to be validated on the idea and now they are validated on implementation, which enables corporations to change a single ingredient of that idea to take out another patent. Also corruption of all parts of government and civil society does not help e.a. lobby-ism, revolving door employment between corporations and government/civil society.

[cestith]

The disclosure of the secret and the limited time are key features of a patent. Comparing making something I bought able to be repaired without encrypted keys has really nothing to do with patents or trade secrets. John Deere cannot patent mathematics. How to encrypt firmware is not a trade secret.

JD is using the DMCA to try blocking this. Their legal argument is that the firmware in the tractor or harvester is copyrighted and that locking down the firmware is a copyright control. Therefore, the DMCA can be used as a cudgel to sue people who bypass the controls to let people maintain the physical equipment they have purchased.

IANAL, but the courts have long maintained that making copies of minimal portions of a work or distributing slightly modified copies of parts of a work for the purposes of compatibility fall under fair use.

https://www.publicknowledge.org/press-release/supreme-court-...

Lexmark v. Static Control Components would appear to be relevant. So would Atari Games Corp v. Nintendo of America, Inc. Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. seems relevant.

If there is no way to make something compatible but the way the vendor has used, US copyright doctrine suggests that way is not protected by copyright or that it is a fair use infringement upon copyright to do things the same way. If, however, there is some creative creative decision made in implementation of an expression of an idea, then the expression and implementation retain full copyright protection. Some other expression of the same thing for the purpose of compatibility, though, would be fair. This is why Franklin could not copy Apple's firmware but could reverse engineer it. It's why Eagle couldn't copy the IBM BIOS but Compaq could reverse engineer it.

The only way to use a third-party part or even to reset the tracking of a first-party sensor for some of these John Deere products is to circumvent the protections on the firmware.

I would expect John Deere to try to use Vernor v. Autodesk in which it's determined that some fine print about software being licensed vs. sold means you can't resell the software after taking possession of it. However, firmware for a tractor is not remotely the same as a CAD or video editing application. It's not a useful thing in its own right and is not the product. It is simply a necessary part of the physical device which was sold.

Hopefully the Librarian of Congress or the Congress itself addresses this intentional crippling of physical goods. It's a troublesome loophole in the DMCA and it's being abused. If the courts take it up, I'm hoping an appeals court or the Supreme Court realizes the difference between a commercial application for installation on a general-purpose computer and the firmware in a tractor, Bluetooth speaker, car, smartphone, or whatever and choose common sense.