John Deere Hit With Class Action Lawsuit for Alleged Tractor Repair Monopoly (vice.com) 57
A class action lawsuit filed in Chicago has accused John Deere of running an illegal repair monopoly. Motherboard reports: The lawsuit alleged that John Deere has used software locks and restricted access to repair documentation and tools, making it very difficult for farmers to fix their own agricultural equipment, a problem that Motherboard has documented for years and that lawmakers, the FTC, and even the Biden administration have acknowledged. The lawsuit claims John Deere is violating antitrust rules and also alleges that Deere is illegally "tying" farmers to Deere-authorized service centers through arbitrary means.
"Farmers have traditionally had the ability to repair and maintain their own tractors as needed, or else have had the option to bring their tractors to an independent mechanic," the lawsuit said. "However, in newer generations of its agricultural equipment, Deere has deliberately monopolized the market for repair and maintenance services of its agricultural equipment with Engine Control Units (ECUs) by making crucial software and repair tools inaccessible to farmers and independent repair shops."
Forest River Farms, a farming corporation in North Dakota, filed the recent antitrust lawsuit against John Deere, alleging that "Deere's network of highly-consolidated independent dealerships is not permitted through their agreements with Deere to provide farmers or repair shops with access to the same software and repair tools the Dealerships have." "As a result of shutting out farmers and independent repair shops from accessing the necessary resources for repairs, Deere and the Dealerships have cornered the Deere Repair Services Market in the United States for Deere-branded agricultural equipment controlled by ECUs and have derived supracompetitive profits from the sale of repair and maintenance services," the lawsuit, which repeatedly cites some of Motherboard's reporting on the issue, continues. [...] The lawsuit alleges that, though Deere has made some types of software and repair parts available to the public, they are "insufficient to restore competition to the Deere repair services market," and notes that "there are no legitimate reasons to restrict access to necessary repair tools."
"Farmers have traditionally had the ability to repair and maintain their own tractors as needed, or else have had the option to bring their tractors to an independent mechanic," the lawsuit said. "However, in newer generations of its agricultural equipment, Deere has deliberately monopolized the market for repair and maintenance services of its agricultural equipment with Engine Control Units (ECUs) by making crucial software and repair tools inaccessible to farmers and independent repair shops."
Forest River Farms, a farming corporation in North Dakota, filed the recent antitrust lawsuit against John Deere, alleging that "Deere's network of highly-consolidated independent dealerships is not permitted through their agreements with Deere to provide farmers or repair shops with access to the same software and repair tools the Dealerships have." "As a result of shutting out farmers and independent repair shops from accessing the necessary resources for repairs, Deere and the Dealerships have cornered the Deere Repair Services Market in the United States for Deere-branded agricultural equipment controlled by ECUs and have derived supracompetitive profits from the sale of repair and maintenance services," the lawsuit, which repeatedly cites some of Motherboard's reporting on the issue, continues. [...] The lawsuit alleges that, though Deere has made some types of software and repair parts available to the public, they are "insufficient to restore competition to the Deere repair services market," and notes that "there are no legitimate reasons to restrict access to necessary repair tools."
Alleged?? LoL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Alleged?? LoL (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone that knows anyone with a John Deere knows this isn't alleged and has been a thing for over 20 years.
John Deere's behavior is not disputed. What is "alleged" is that is it is a monopoly.
JD is not the only tractor brand. They have about 15% of the market. The repair lockdown is only on newer models, so the farmers who bought them should have known what they were agreeing to. JD's case is supported by your claim that "anyone who knows anyone" was aware of the behavior.
The plaintiffs are arguing that the monopoly is not on tractors or even the repair of tractors but only on some repairs of one brand. Courts have often been skeptical of complaints about "monopolies" over small market segments.
This would be better addressed through "right to repair" legislation rather than anti-trust, but R2R has not had much legislative success.
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Agreed. I think this has little chance of success. It is widely known that Deere does this for some of their largest and most complex agricultural equipment. If I was in the market for that type of equipment and I didn't want to be married to my dealer for repairs and maintenance, I'd buy another brand of equipment. There are many to choose from in that segment. The vast majority of their equipment is not subject to this issue. I own a pretty new smaller Deere tractor and can have it fixed/maintained
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Agreed. I think this has little chance of success. It is widely known that Deere does this for some of their largest and most complex agricultural equipment. If I was in the market for that type of equipment and I didn't want to be married to my dealer for repairs and maintenance, I'd buy another brand of equipment. There are many to choose from in that segment. The vast majority of their equipment is not subject to this issue. I own a pretty new smaller Deere tractor and can have it fixed/maintained anywhere I want (I actually just do it myself).
Best,
I wonder though. If Deere is forced to essentially open source it's software and allow anyone to repair any and all aspects of it's tractors - will the right to repair mean that everything must be made repairable by anyone?
I've noted in the past that there can be a choice - make everything easily repairable by anyone, or have increased sophistication. During lockdown, I repaired some 1960's Heathkit radios. Easy to repair, you can still get all of the components. Completely outclassed by my Software def
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I wonder though. If Deere is forced to essentially open source it's software and allow anyone to repair any and all aspects of it's tractors - will the right to repair mean that everything must be made repairable by anyone?
I've noted in the past that there can be a choice - make everything easily repairable by anyone, or have increased sophistication.
I think that's a bit of a false dichotomy, for this case at least. For one, a large part of the reason these tractors aren't repairable is John Deer has explicitly designed their software and created copyrights to shut competitors out. If John Deer tractors were just so sophisticated that nobody else could figure out how to do it, I don't think people would be raising a stink about it. The irritation is that effectively these are artificial and legal constructs to force vendor lock in.
Secondly, I think t
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Exactly. The underlying, fundamental problem that's far bigger than JD is relatively straight forward:
Companies are abusing copyright and DMCA, etc. to force a product lock-in through legal means - not for any technical or security necessity. Many of them have been compromised to various degrees but it doesn't matter because that code/key/etc. can't be distributed. Stupid car analogy - someone make a trivially different lugnut and now if you want your tire serviced you have to pay them $$$ to use the too
Re: Alleged?? LoL (Score:2)
"married"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rT... [youtube.com]
Of course, John wears the pants in the relationship.
Re:Alleged?? LoL (Score:4, Informative)
John Deere's behavior is not disputed. What is "alleged" is that is it is a monopoly.
JD is not the only tractor brand. They have about 15% of the market.
The market share numbers depends on the definition of the market.
According to the link [bloomberg.com] cited in the complaint document, "Deere’s metallic-green-and-yellow farm vehicles dominate the world’s $68 billion market for agricultural equipment, accounting for more than half of all farm machinery sales in the U.S. and more than a third of equipment revenue worldwide—a bigger market share than that of the next two tractor makers, Case New Holland and Kubota Corp., combined."
This discrepancy between an oft-quoted 15-18% of the market is explained by the following [economicliberties.us]: "Deere & Co. is the largest farm equipment corporation in the world, selling twice as much machinery as its two next-largest competitors combined. Deere controls 53 percent of the U.S. market for large tractors and 60 percent of the U.S. market for farm combines. These sub-sectoral monopolies help explain Deere’s 18 percent share of the overall farming equipment market, the largest of any corporation in a market where the four largest operators control 45 percent of all sales."
Case & Kubota would be pissed (Score:2)
If this case succeeds. It removes a strong competitive advantage for them.
Unless they are also on in the game.
That is the problem. Once something like this monopolization becomes part of the culture everyone does it.
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When I was a kid in the 80's I saw John Deere, Case IH, Massey Ferguson, and Gleaner combines scattered around the Minnesota countryside. Now it's almost all John Deere, at least for the newer stuff. So yeah, they've kind of gotten a strangle hold on the market.
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I don't understand why they'd be buying only JD.
I have read where JD has a system where the farmer doesn't even have to be in the tractor. It'll do the field all by itself.
Re:Alleged?? LoL (Score:5, Insightful)
D is not the only tractor brand. They have about 15% of the market. The repair lockdown is only on newer models, so the farmers who bought them should have known what they were agreeing to. JD's case is supported by your claim that "anyone who knows anyone" was aware of the behavior.
The plaintiffs are arguing that the monopoly is not on tractors or even the repair of tractors but only on some repairs of one brand. Courts have often been skeptical of complaints about "monopolies" over small market segments.
This would be better addressed through "right to repair" legislation rather than anti-trust, but R2R has not had much legislative success.
IMHO, "these aren't "right to repair" issues, they are private property issues. Private property rights have been chipped away in favor of big business for two decades, and it's getting worse by the year. We'll all be in trouble if we don't restore them.
Historically, when money changed hands, so did ownership of the physical good, and anything inseparably tied to the physical good was also considered the property of the purchaser. You couldn't sell a book, for instance, and claim that the paper and covers were the property of the purchaser, but the words were "licensed" and therefore you were free to grab the book and scribble paragraphs out with the magic marker at your discretion.
Eventually, moneyed companies bribed politicians to do things analogous to this, and the net result is the widespread abrogation of personal property rights by corporations who can always be counted on to act in their own interests and against yours. To sieze your private property rights, all a company has to do is ensure something, somewhere on the product runs some form of code, at which point the company can sell products, then retain control over them, without your consent if need be.
This was relatively unthinkable two decades ago, but the frog was boiled slowly, and now we're all supposed to "expect it".
This scam is easy to effectuate when the average IQ of a nation is 98 and people with IQs under 95 are ten times morenumerous than people with IQs above 130. And of course, the companies point to the 70% of Americans with IQs 110 (the rough line where true critical/abstract thinking lies) as evidence the the people are more than happy to no longer own what they purchase.
What remains are the other 30% who beg and plead for legislation to protect them from the majority, most of whom will accept whatever they are given, and are unlikely to question it.
Without the proliferation of common sense and basic decency, the 70% will give away every right we ever fought for, and they will do it willingly. Everyone else can only plead for sanity to prevail, and hope that it does, but with Congress full of defacto luddites, it can be a truly tough climb. If private property rights are not inalienable, then they will be alienated by the masses, to the detriment of the minority that still cares.
Then there are folks like you who like the new paradigm, and you tirelessly point to the fine print and the "agreement" as proof positive that everyone willingly gave up their rights, and should thus shut the hell up and accept it like you have.
I thank my lucky stars every day that those people who push back exist, though, for if they did not, can you even imagine the world we would be living in now?
It certainly would not be the Utopia you think it would be, that much I can guarantee you.
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That's the best post I've read here in quite a while. Thanks for your thoughtfulness and eloquence. I wish I had mod points; alas, I haven't had any in quite a few months.
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JD is not the only tractor brand. They have about 15% of the market.
As a couple others have pointed out, your 15% number is conflating the entire agricultural equipment market with the market for large US farming equipment (tractors, combines, etc.). Yeah, there's a lot of other brands of small utility tractors (although even that is misleading, like everything else a lot of those brands are consolidated under one roof at this point). But a utility tractor isn't really agricultural equipment, although most farms may have a little one to putter around in for small jobs. Y
Re: Alleged?? LoL (Score:2)
Maybe people could buy a tractor elsewhere.
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Re: Alleged?? LoL (Score:1)
Apple they are coming for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple, take notice, 'the right to repair is' coming for you! You'd better send some of your best law-buddies over to help John Deere win this on or you will be next. Imagine a world where independent repair shops and dare I say mere hobbyists can get chips, chargeports, screens, batteries at a competitive price. Run Apple run!
Full disclosure, I bought a new Mac Book Pro M1 on the advice of Teachlead, I do whatever Techlead tells me.
https://youtu.be/eAr8ReEUhM0 [youtu.be]
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On top of that, the claim that "repair of John Deere tractors" is an entire market where competition must be protected is somewhere between insane and hilarious.
Howso? Self reliance is a cornerstone of the American identity. I would go so far as to say that anti right to repair actions are un-American. They are also anti-competitive.
Once you sell something, it is no longer yours. You give up all rights to decide how it is handled, what it does, or who repairs it. If that's not what you want, then you may not represent the transaction as a sale. Note that in law, if it LOOKS like a sale, it is a sale.
If Deere wants to control how the equipment is repaired, then it s
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How is it anti-competitive? I actually sounds like an opportunity for competition, a company which will sell open source tractors. Why isn't there a company eating John Deere's lunch selling open tractors? Could it because almost nobody will want to buy their products (too expensive, or no service companies willing to train anyone on fixing them because it's not profitable)? Ever noticed how more people prefer to buy Apple products, all locked down and integrated, over buying an open source phone on which t
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How is it anti-competitive?
Someone who is otherwise able and willing to repair your tractor for less than the dealer demands (or is willing to do it sooner or is willing to come to where the tractor is) is prevented from doing so because Deere implemented DRM on their tractor's local bus and protects it with the DMCA of all things. That is, they have eliminated competition in the field of repairing John Deere tractors.
When one buys a Bugatti car, one knows up front the oil change service is $25K, if you don't want to pay it, don't buy one
Actually, even though it is a huge pain to change the oil in a Bugatti, no technical measures have been taken to prev
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Fixing John Deere tractors is no more a market it itself than an autograph market for a specific celebrity. Guess what, Joe Biden has a monopoly on signing Joe Biden autographs, Porsche has a monopoly on selling new Porsche cars, Rolex has a monopoly on new Rolex watches, etc, etc. So what? None of those are protected markets as far as anti-trust laws, nor should they be.
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You're trying to define away the problem with your argument, but that's not how it works. Repair is separable from manufacturing and has been since forever. Joe's garage can repair a Ford, or you can take it to the Ford dealer or fix it yourself or take it to Al's garage instead. You can even alter your Ford until it barely resembles the original. The latest trend of restricting the market and nailing the invisible hand to the table is an artifact of poor regulation and foolishly allowing the DMCA to pass w
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Not at all. It's you who is trying to define yourself into a problem by defining a market as narrow as "repair of a specific brand product". As I said before, if customers prefer a more open product, the customers can buy a more open product, nobody is forcing them to buy John Deere. It's not like they hide the fact that the equipment can only be serviced by authorized repair services. If John Deere had over 80% of the tractor market, or was colluding with other brands fixing prices, sure, bring in anti-tru
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Yea, I really don't get this one either. As an open-source-software advocate, John Deere's criminality in this matter is utterly transparent to me and the solution for it is equally as clear. One has to wonder if these farmers knew a damned thing about the internet if the very culture of open-source-software might have permeated their rural societies far enough to inform them of exactly how to make a stand against this as well. Maybe some secondary, less obvious force has been involved in astroturfing ov
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And, here's the thing. They're fucking with the food supply, so this is all our business now. This needs to be stopped even if we have to stop it for them.
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Re: Where are the Freedom (tm) Lovers? (Score:3)
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Bigger corp : less ethics, more cover ups of health issues, etc.
Citation needed. Small farms have more soil erosion and more inappropriate use of pesticides. Advocates of worker rights have more problems with small farmers underpaying workers and failing to provide facilities such as clean portable toilets. The big corps have adopted more benign practices such as no-till farming while small farms have stuck to more destructive traditional methods.
I'd rather have a ton of small independent farmers out there
That is romantic idealism rather than reality.
Re: Where are the Freedom (tm) Lovers? (Score:2)
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One component of that ideology has been a constant drum beat that government needs to leave corporations alone, they will self regulate, and corporate wrongs are actually just socialists trying to overthrow our country. So they've been primed to look the other way. It's taking time, but they are starting to recognize this a blatant dig at their pocket books. This could eventually send political tremors through farm country, as farmers and big ag won't necessarily be lobbying for the same things. Farmers can
Re: Where are the Freedom (tm) Lovers? (Score:2)
Ol Olsoc (Score:2)
Re:Ol Olsoc (Score:4, Informative)
John Deere makes some of the most comfortable, easy-to-operate, reliable machines in the industry. I have three older Deeres and they have been wonderful machines. It's a bit hard to explain, but there's a refinement that John Deere has achieved, particularly noticeable in the steering. A bit hard to describe to someone not experienced with tractors and large machines. That said, where John Deere has been going is not somewhere I want to go and I'm less and less enamoured with them, and less impressed overall. My next machines will not be green. I guess it's fortunate that in general I don't like their latest machines, with how they've changed the operation of the IVT and shuttle shifter.
John Deere very much sees itself as the Apple of tractors. They have a complete ecosystem they want you to buy into and then lock you into. Part of this is done through the trade-in treadmill (highest resale value in the industry they say), and partly through their new cloud connection services. I think they fancy themselves a cloud computing company who happens to sell tractors for customers to log into the cloud with. For many farmers, what Deere is doing works very well. Especially large farmers. As long as you trade up every couple of years, have the dealer do everything, life is good. Basically a steady income stream for John Deere. Just because you own a machine doesn't mean you still pay every year one way or the other.
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But according to Ol Olsoc, every farmer he knows is happy with John Deere. Therefore, this can't be true. There can't be enough farmers who hate the arrangement, therefore this class action is fake news. https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
It's pretty amazing when you bold face lie to make a point. I'll just repost it here:
"All the farmers I know are happy to allow an expert to fix their tractors. They usually have a spare to use while their main squeeze is being fixed."
Never wrote a word about Farmers being happy with John Deer. Not every farmer I know even has one.
Seriously dood, shame on ya.
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Your original comment tried to distract away from the discussion being John Deere to a more general one. That's your choice. That's your fault.
I'm just not letting you get away with it. That's not lying. I even included the link to your comment. It shows that the context was John Deere, and you tried to dishonestly
I say it's time to send John Deere a Dear John (Score:3)
I say it's time to send John Deere a Dear John
For the safety of consumers (Score:2)
Unless these companies open-source their software, how can we be assured that it is safe?
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Nothing FUCKs you over like Deere DRM (Score:2)
A new X Prize (Score:1)
I'm not a farmer so this is a real question... (Score:2)
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Think of it this way, Deere = Apple with their walled garden. All the cool kids want to use it because all the other cool kids are already using it. It doesn't matter if there is another phone or tablet made by other companies
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Not only that but the other big manufacturers of this sort of equipment that sell in the US including AGCO (who make Massey-Ferguson, Challenger and others) and CNH Industrial (who make Case, International Harvester, New Holland and others) are also anti-repair.
I don't think you can buy a new combine harvester in the US at all where the manufacturer is fully on the side of right-to-repair.
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It sounds like the free will of the people picks the product they prefer to buy. Just like with phones, you can get a perfectly functional open source phone you can fix yourself or pay anyone on the internet to fix for you, or even add features. Why should the government get involved here telling people that the majority is wrong in their choices? If you really want government involvement, perhaps ask for better education and hope that educated people make choices along the lines of yours, but that is not a
#Right to repair (Score:3)
Now.
No "please".
No argument.
NOW.
Forced / tied hand repair? (Score:2)