[HN Gopher] Judge allows major 'right to repair' lawsuit against...
___________________________________________________________________
Judge allows major 'right to repair' lawsuit against John Deere to
move forward
Author : rntn
Score : 255 points
Date : 2023-12-08 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techdirt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techdirt.com)
| chongli wrote:
| This is good to see. It does not seem to involve any right to
| repair legislation though. Looks like it's purely an antitrust
| case where the claim is that John Deere is monopolizing the
| repair industry through consolidation.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| John Deere is a 200 year old company and I am amazed at the
| goodwill they've burnt in a tenth of the time with these
| shenanigans.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| I think it's a signal of changing market dynamics. Old John
| Deere just needed to sell the best tractors. They built a
| reputation and that was good enough.
|
| Today's JD needs anti-repair policies, subscription pricing,
| and closed source code. It's easy to blame JD and maybe they do
| deserve blame but with so many companies pulled these
| shenanigans I think it's just a symptom of a wider economic
| pressures in the industry.
| depressedpanda wrote:
| I would say it's more greed than pressure.
| cptaj wrote:
| I see why you might think that but is there really data to
| back it up?
|
| Making good products and respecting your customers is a great
| way to stay in business. I don't see why china selling
| tractors would change that. If anything, it would matter more
| than ever.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Because the vast majority of customers are fickle and
| estimating true long term cost is very difficult so many
| make purchasing decisions based on sticker price. Also most
| farms are corporate farms where I suspect they just deal
| with JD support contracts as the price of doing business
| based into their financial models vs having their own.
| autoexec wrote:
| > I think it's a signal of changing market dynamics. Old John
| Deere just needed to sell the best tractors. They built a
| reputation and that was good enough.
|
| So is the changing market dynamic is that John Deere now
| sells shitty tractors which means they have to depend on DRM
| and forcing people to get repairs through them in order to be
| profitable?
|
| I suspect the reason so many companies resort to user-hostile
| anti-competitive practices is simply greed and a willingness
| to screw over anyone to make an extra buck at any cost. They
| want to have ever growing profits and growth which means they
| have to come up with more and more ways to take our money.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Pretty much nobody at Deere thinks they're screwing anyone
| over.
|
| Farmers are still buying Deere equipment for a lot of
| reasons, including the fact that Deere has by far the best
| service network during planting and harvest seasons. You
| will have the least likelihood of disastrous downtime with
| Deere equipment. Forcing you to get service from the
| service network makes sure that the service network
| continues to exist.
|
| It's a complicated situation. (I support right to repair,
| btw)
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| A narcissist never means to make other people's lives
| hell. They are of course the best at everything they do,
| and if you can't keep up, that is your problem not
| theirs.
| chongli wrote:
| Calling it narcissism is uncharitable. This comment [1]
| goes a long way towards explaining the whole story. The
| comparison with electrical peak demand is apt.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572228
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Calling it uncharitable is narcissism. This has been
| theft and lawfare on a massive scale.
| chongli wrote:
| I'm a big supporter of right to repair. But now that I've
| read that perspective I don't think we can have our cake
| and eat it too. I think if JD loses then we end up in a
| situation where the service they provided (timely repairs
| during a crisis in the harvest season) is no longer
| available at any price.
|
| Then what? We probably see higher volatility due to an
| increase in crop failures, but maybe lower average food
| prices overall.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| 30 years ago, John Deere had that Network of service
| technicians and ready on demand parts. It was probably
| slightly smaller, then, and many of the farmers (both
| small independent and large corporate farmers) had more
| of a stock and more knowledge of how to repair their
| tools, but not fundamentally different. Harvest being
| crunch time was not brought about by the computer
| revolution. Harvest being crunch time was not brought
| about by just in time logistics. Both have allowed John
| Deere to do more with less by understanding where it's
| stock of inventory is better, rather than having to have
| a staff of quartermasters running those books. That
| efficiency is not because of their DRM, but the rising
| tide of computer logistics.
|
| Having exclusive ability to repair their tractors does
| not make it easier for John Deere to stock that
| inventory. It makes it more profitable for them to stock
| that inventory, because they know they can sell it. That
| profit allows them to tighten their margins elsewhere,
| and to expand their belt elsewhere, but it does not
| fundamentally change the actual repair. It does make it
| easier in some ways that they can exploit supply and
| demand and economies of scale.
|
| There are other ways that John Deere can enforce said
| Monopoly. They can sign contracts. Maintenance contracts
| are very common in this space, stating that you will only
| do business with John deere. That's not an unreasonable
| thing to do. I am a okay if every farmer wants to sign
| that contract with John Deere. If John Deere were to make
| that part of every purchase, at least it would be
| understood that it were part of every purchase, that you
| could not buy John Deere tractors without buying their
| service contracts, and how that interacts with existing
| antitrust law is a separate problem. One that has been
| discussed to death and will continue to be.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Pretty much nobody at Deere thinks they're screwing
| anyone over.
|
| Which doesn't actually mean they _aren 't_ screwing
| people over. Personally, I don't know if they are or not
| -- I'm not a farmer, and I don't know what all the issues
| specific to farmers are.
|
| But the arguments that JD are making are ones that are
| bad for everyone outside of the farm equipment business.
| In that sense, they're helping to screw all of us over.
| jjkeddo199 wrote:
| Reform idea:
|
| Capital gains tax should be split into two categories: Medium
| term (1+ year) and very long term (7+ years). Very long term
| tax would be much lower than today's tax, while medium term
| would be higher. This reform would reduce MBA's plundering
| company goodwill and trust for short-term quarterly boosts
| and reward long-term thinking.
| AlphaOne1 wrote:
| Interesting idea. I have recently been reading John C.
| Bogle's work (of Vanguard fame) and he seems to be of the
| opinion, from my interpretation, that short term
| speculation will have disasterious consequences for the
| Stock Market and that we need a sort of Sin Tax to
| discourage such behavior. Your idea would track with that.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Not just the stock market. The short term thinking person
| induced by that has knock off issues all over the place,
| from environmental to healthcare to the physical harm of
| workers being pushed too hard in the name of short term
| profit.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I think you can get around this by just keeping ownership
| for 7 years, but promising any profit/loss from 6 of those
| 7 years to someone else via a private contract-for-
| differnce.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're trying to exacerbate an existing problem with the
| tax code.
|
| If you invest in a company that goes on to become a
| conglomerate, nearly all of the value is now a capital
| gain. You can't invest it in something else without
| inducing a taxable event. Which means that investors prefer
| to keep their money in existing conglomerates than move it
| into prospective competitors. It's a huge tax preference to
| keep money invested in megacorps rather than new
| challengers.
|
| It may even be the cause rather than the solution here.
| Because selling shares of a company that had previously
| been growing has a major tax disadvantage, investors then
| want those companies to keep growing even though they've
| saturated their market, so they demand abusive practices
| which are long-term detrimental to the company in order to
| keep the short-term growth rate competitive. Meanwhile this
| deprives potential challengers of capital which makes
| abusive practices more effective by making markets less
| competitive.
|
| It could even make it worse. If you've invested in a
| company 5 years ago, you're stuck holding it for another
| two years and now you want to goose the stock price so it
| peaks when you hit the lower tax rate.
|
| We may be better off with the opposite -- allow basis
| transfers without a taxable event when you're only changing
| what you're investing in rather than divesting in order to
| spend the money. Remove the tax preference for abusive
| conglomerates.
| gen220 wrote:
| > allow basis transfers without a taxable event when
| you're only changing what you're investing in rather than
| divesting in order to spend the money
|
| This is an appealing idea, but it comes at the expense of
| even further reducing taxes that are typically paid by
| wealthy people.
|
| How to beneficially tax equity-related transactions is a
| really tricky problem to solve.
|
| Trying to lay out the balance of an ideal solution:
|
| (1) We want people to invest in equities (2) we do want
| to [eventually] tax profits (3) We do want investors to
| adjust allocations from low-growth-expectation assets to
| high-growth-expectation assets, because high-growth-
| expectation is a signal of filling a gap in demand.
|
| I think I'd be on board with your suggestion, which
| essentially trades off 2 for 3.
|
| I think we'd need to bundle it with a serious revision of
| estate taxes and the various schemes people use to get
| around them. So you're definitely taxed when you convert
| your tax-aware capital gains into income, or your heirs
| are taxed when those capital gains become their
| inheritance.
|
| Maybe if we bundle two unpopular reforms together, we can
| get a popular reform. :)
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Or just make it a function of time, e.g. varying
| proportional to 1/(time in years).
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Today 's JD needs anti-repair policies, subscription
| pricing, and closed source code_
|
| Is JD being evil or are they just bowing to competitive
| pressure? At a certain point the question becomes hard to
| answer. When certain behaviors we'd consider awful have been
| normalized throughout a sector of society (management in this
| case), there's always an argument about whether someone can
| be blamed for "just following orders" or "just implementing
| standard procedures" etc.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Is JD being evil or are they just bowing to competitive
| pressure?
|
| That's not an either-or kind of thing.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| Part of their reasoning why the software needs to be locked
| down is that tractors are priced based on horsepower and
| they use software to limit the horsepower of different
| tractors (which use the same actual engine). Otherwise, one
| could pay for (numbers made up) a 100 horsepower tractor
| and then unlock it so that they now have 150 hp.
|
| Unfortunately for farmers, everything is controlled by
| software, so every repair now needs a service call and JD
| has been cutting back on service techs so that during peak
| activity times (planting/harvest - where working 24 hrs
| isn't uncommon) it can be either (a) put your tractor on a
| flat bed and have it trucked hundreds of miles, or (b) wait
| a couple weeks.
|
| It comes across as evil to me.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The proof that it is not wider economic pressures is their
| profit margin trend:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DE/deere/profit-
| ma...
|
| Due to advances in software, they saw an opportunity to
| increase their profit margins.
|
| The question is, are there insufficient businesses that can
| sell what Deere sells without the restricting software at a
| lower price? Based on Deere's success in increasing its
| profit margins, it seems like the answer is no.
|
| So then the question is why are there insufficient
| businesses? Is selling what Deere sells so high barrier to
| entry that a new seller will not try? Is it possible to lower
| those barriers to entry?
| wongarsu wrote:
| Maybe it just takes longer for the market to react. Selling
| farming equipment has a local component to it: you need
| local dealers and a robust service network. Countries also
| tend have protectionist policies about the market, since
| farming is of strategic importance. All of this slows down
| the expansion of competitors. Add to that that the average
| lifetime of farming equipment is very high.
|
| The ~10 years that John Deere has shown this behavior might
| just be too little for the market to adjust.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| JD does the hard stuff that others aren't as willing to
| invest in: a large service network with spare parts and
| spare machines.
|
| Harvest time can be make-or-break for farmers. Stuff you
| don't expect like a large storm at the end of summer can
| blow over corn stalks. That makes it a lot slower to run
| the combine at harvest time. If early fall storms are
| forecast you might literally need to get everyone available
| out in the field to harvest the corn in the next 3-4 days
| or you can expect the value of your crop to drop
| dramatically - everything will be wet and it's no longer
| warm or sunny enough for it to dry out. The field turns to
| mud and the grain elevator ain't gonna pay full price for
| water-soaked corn.
|
| Everyone else is in the same boat so every available
| truck+driver is booked. Every mechanic is already 5
| tractors backlogged from all the other farmers with
| emergencies.
|
| Then your harvester/combine dies.
|
| If you're with JD... they have a crews of
| engineers/mechanics and semi trailers loaded with parts
| driving around the country following the harvest. They will
| get you going again in a day or two, not 1-4 weeks later
| when some other dealer can fit you in or when the spare
| part you need arrives.
|
| From JD's perspective that service network and parts stock
| costs a lot of money to maintain so it is available during
| harvest. They don't want customers going the cheap
| aftermarket route 11 months of the year because one month
| of sales can't sustain harvest support teams long-term.
| It's similar to peak electric generation capacity.
| Generator plants aren't economic if they only run 5% of the
| year at regular prices. In this analogy peak pricing has a
| limit: it would very quickly make harvesting the crop
| unprofitable.
|
| FWIW I do think it's mostly a money grab by JD. Same reason
| Chamberlain closed their garage door opener API and has
| locked down myIQ: they want to force platforms, automakers,
| etc to pay for access to "their" customers and turn garage
| door openers into MRR. It's basically free money that you
| couldn't even imagine prior to the internet.
| timc3 wrote:
| Growing up on a farm 30 years ago - we wouldn't have to
| wait a day or two. You would start fixing the problem
| straight away, worse case being someone would have to
| drive to get a part and then you would install it.
|
| And many parts you could fix yourself with a well stocked
| workshop (think welding gear, cutting equipment, stuff to
| work on hydraulics, lots of random crap, spare bits of
| metal and a large space or in the field).
|
| Then came the computers...
| tomwheeler wrote:
| That's exactly right. My grandfather owned a fairly large
| farm and had a workshop so he and the workers could
| service the equipment on site. Some of the tractors
| lasted 30 years or more because they were so well
| maintained. Even in his 70s, the joints he welded when
| repairing them were far better than the originals.
| bluGill wrote:
| At what cost. I'll bet your grandfather never tracked the
| cost of his workshop and time. Note too that the scenario
| is all hands on deck harvesting - skipping one day of
| harvest can (if there is worst case storm) cost your more
| in profit than a brand new combine.
|
| If you have to pay someone labor the cost of keeping old
| machines running adds up a lot farther than most people
| realize. I know one construction company owner who in the
| 1990s worked it all out - all that 30 year old equipment
| that he was keeping running. Then he want to a dealer and
| signed a lease for $25,000/month, as he left the
| negotiations, reeling from the price tag, his account
| turned to him and said "you just saved yourself
| $30,000/month".
| gen220 wrote:
| When you outsource support, that carries costs that are
| difficult to measure and not carried in the lease. Your
| "supply chain of business" just became less robust.
|
| If you're in a business where a couple of days in lead
| time for repair can make or break a harvest, (1) having a
| repairs workshop (2) investing in tools you can reliably
| repair yourself is essentially an insurance premium that
| protects your harvest by placing its success squarely
| within the hands of the part _most interested_ in
| success.
|
| This "insurance" aspect is something that accountants
| reliably fail to account for, because it doesn't show up
| in any business ledger. But this way of thinking
| generally wins because it increases fiscal efficiency,
| while the side-effect of making systems more fragile is
| consistently written-off.
| apercu wrote:
| I'm hoping I get 30 years out of my sub-compact tractor.
| I'd hate to be an old man and have to buy another one on
| retirement income...
|
| These things are not lawnmowers, and they should (if
| cared for) last.
|
| I refused to even shop John Deere, the green paint tax is
| too high and on top of it you have all this subscription
| and computer B.S.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _They don 't want customers going the cheap aftermarket
| route 11 months of the year because one month of sales
| can't sustain harvest support teams long-term._
|
| It can if you charge more for it...
| Loughla wrote:
| So they already do that. There is a very distinct price
| difference between off season repairs and emergency field
| repairs. Both on labor and parts.
| m463 wrote:
| > They will get you going again in a day or two
|
| what if they prevent you from doing it yourself in a
| minute or two?
| donmcronald wrote:
| > In this analogy peak pricing has a limit: it would very
| quickly make harvesting the crop unprofitable.
|
| What? Equalizing or normalizing the costs over the entire
| year by price gouging on repairs during non-peak months
| doesn't suddenly make the total cost any different.
| Farmer's are absolutely bearing the cost having a service
| network that can satisfy peak demand no matter what kind
| of pricing scheme is backing it.
|
| If a low priority repair costs $5 in the off season, but
| $55 for the same thing during the peak, farmers aren't
| better off getting charged $30 for both. It's still $60
| at the end of the year. If anything, that penalizes the
| farmer that's doing preventative maintenance in the off-
| season and benefits the farmer that leaves their
| equipment to break down at critical times. The
| responsible person is subsidizing the irresponsible
| person in that case.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Then surely, instead of trying to poison the legal
| landscape around these issues for everybody, they could
| cover their business needs by no longer selling that
| equipment, but leasing it.
|
| Then they could make the terms of the lease be amenable
| to the economics of their business without working to
| make things worse for everybody else.
| robbiep wrote:
| We've got 2 S680s my uncle has a couple of X10s and a
| whole shed of s7 series and our whole district is green.
|
| There were a lot of green machines sitting on the
| sidelines this harvest waiting for technicians to get
| their shit together to reset this or service that.
|
| Back in the era of the 95XX or even 8820s you could do it
| all yourself.
|
| Now a fucking light comes on and you need to call someone
| to drive over an hour from our nearest dealership to plug
| in his gizmo to say this needs to happen. Not to mention
| they totally understock on prices.
|
| Harvesting is rapidly becoming unprofitable. Just because
| an X10 can strip 50 tons an hour doesn't mean it's
| worthwhile at $1m a machine. That's why we keep a CTS2 on
| the sidelines. Mightn't strip as fast but at least it's
| reliable and we can maintain it without getting a site
| visit
| marcyb5st wrote:
| I'm my personal opinion stuff like this are increasingly
| happening since MBAs started running every kind of companies,
| not only financial ones.
|
| It seems to me that they push for some short term profit to get
| bonuses and promotions and then move to do the same things
| elsewhere.
|
| However, it could also be a personal selection or survivor bias
| in my memory (I remember stuff like that more). Nevertheless,
| it really feels that very few companies optimize for the long
| run by prioritizing user satisfaction or similar metrics.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Outside incentives line up with that too. Most investors seem
| to want quick gains, not steady growth.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Things like 401ks are the biggest trick wall street pulled
| on the public at large. Now they don't need to defend their
| actions because many in the public are financially
| incentivized to defend them. It's not a sin if its done in
| the name of making my stock go up.
| Loughla wrote:
| I hear you, but I just can't be convinced that was a
| motivator. The main motivator, I believe, was to drive
| costs WAY down by eliminating pensions while shifting
| that burden to the workers.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is, the golden shields were just
| a happy accident of other terrible behaviors?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I heard this same kind of justification used by a CEO in
| a former workplace. I stood there thinking "I'm a multi-
| year permatemp with no 401k. Shove this BS and give me a
| good paying job so that I _can_ put money toward
| retirement. "; didn't say anything though.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's almost purely because of the connectedness and software-
| eats-the-world society we have today. Before it wasn't
| practical or even possible to withhold total ownership from
| consumers, but as soon as it was, corps jumped on it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This. And software developers are helping to make the
| dystopia real.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It's at least partly due to the tendency of the rate of
| profit to fall over time.
|
| To maintain or increase profits, it becomes necessary to
| exploit workers more to reduce costs and to prevent
| competition to increase prices.
| bozhark wrote:
| 'Bout time
| skeptrune wrote:
| I understand that they're trying to preserve their service
| network, but that's not a valid reason to prevent people from
| repairing their purchased machines.
|
| Happy to see this going through.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you request summary dismissal of a lawsuit you end up losing,
| you should be required to pay double-damages.
|
| This whole idea of each party delaying the case requesting
| summary dismissal just to drive costs up for the other side is
| stupid.
| pdq wrote:
| "Loser pays" is a better and simpler legal system.
| ghaff wrote:
| Which means that people without much money can't risk suing a
| company with deep pockets.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| As opposed to the current system, where people without much
| money can't risk suing a company with deep pockets because
| they don't have the money for a lawyer.
| ghaff wrote:
| Money obviously is a factor in any case. But, if you hire
| a lawyer, you at least have control of the costs. "Loser
| pays" means you pay for the company's Big Law outside
| counsel if you lose.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you have a solid case any good lawyer will take the
| case for a share of what you win - they won't win all
| such cases, but they have enough confidence in winning
| most that they can afford to accept a cases will be done
| without getting paid. However if there is loser pays
| lawyers cannot do this unless they either take a much
| larger share for the winnings (thus making it not worth
| anyone's time) so they can cover the lawyer fees when
| they lose a case they thought was obvious, or they need
| to warn potential clients there is risk they have to pay
| a lot of money on a loss.
|
| Either way loser pays makes it more risky for a poor
| person to sue.
| teeray wrote:
| It would be interesting if "pays" was proportional to a
| party's assets to ensure equal (yet not ruinous) pain.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| It could just be capped at the lower of what the two
| legal teams charge. Both should have to submit their
| bills to the court, whichever charged less is the cap on
| what the loser has to pay for the other party's legal
| fees. That way each party is at most on the hook for
| twice what they paid their own legal team, assuming no
| other damages or penalties.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| This is gameable (for instance by disclosing millions of
| unrelated pages of content during discovery). All you
| really need is for the judge to look at how much each
| legal team charged for what and make a ruling on what's
| reasonable for the loser to pay and what isn't.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| What you want is fee-shifting. Doesn't need to be tied to the
| presence of a motion to dismiss. Unfortunately this is so un-
| American a concept we literally call it the French Rule (or the
| English Rule)[0].
|
| The purpose of a motion to dismiss is to make getting rid of
| bullshit lawsuits easier. That is, if someone sues you for
| something that, say, _isn 't actually illegal_, you get to
| throw out the lawsuit without having to go through discovery
| and a trial. This is important because rich people who can
| afford lawyers will absolutely sue[1] you as a censorship
| tactic, and being able to dismiss the suit quickly is the
| difference between a $10k legal bill and a $100k legal bill. In
| fact, anti-SLAPP bills work by giving you a fancy motion to
| dismiss that _also_ triggers fee-shifting - which is enough for
| the rich person 's lawyers to dissuade them from a censorious
| lawsuit.
|
| So I don't think we should make motions to dismiss more
| perilous to file. They're the last speck of respectability in
| our awful legal system. We should instead make _wasting the
| other party 's time_ cost money.
|
| [0] Except in copyright where you _can_ get fee-shifting under
| specific conditions.
|
| [1] Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > We should instead make wasting the other party's time cost
| money.
|
| How do you prove that, though?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| You don't prove it, the other party proves it to the judge
| by their inept case.
|
| I think limits should be placed even on this, as poorer
| people are more likely to have a bad case as a plaintiff as
| they can only afford to personally represent themselves.
|
| For those representing themselves it should start coming up
| a bit before they'd be declared a vexatious litigant. For
| those represented by an attorney, it should probably be the
| attorney paying the fee for wasting the other party's time
| and money.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I'm of the opposite mind: motions for summary dismissal should
| be made as approachable as possible, ideally to the point that
| an individual with some basic internet-access level research
| can file one easily. That cuts down dramatically on the "we
| have enough resources to bleed you dry" style lawsuit, if you
| can simply say "Gigacorp is suing me for violation of their
| non-compete clause. Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in
| this state. Please go away" before even needing to get a lawyer
| involved.
| Trisell wrote:
| Right to repair is such an issue in the farming space right now,
| Big Bud re-entered the markets with a fully repairable tractor.
| Rumors are that pre-orders are significant.
|
| https://agupdate.com/farmandranchguide/news/state-and-region...
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