State of Iron: Who Owns Your Tractor?
About this episode
Dan Aberhart discusses right-to-repair and digital sovereignty in agriculture with guest Cory Doctorow, focusing on the implications of Canada's Copyright Modernization Act.
Dan Aberhart hosts Cory Doctorow -- author, journalist, and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- for a State of Iron live briefing on right-to-repair and digital sovereignty in agriculture. The anchor event is the John Deere $99 million right-to-repair settlement, but Doctorow's central argument is that the settlement addresses a symptom, not the cause. The cause is Canada's Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-11, 2012), which makes it illegal to bypass digital locks on any device -- including farm equipment -- even when the purpose is legal repair or the installation of superior third-party components. Doctorow ties parts pairing, farm data harvesting, and the remote immobilization of stolen Ukrainian tractors into a single argument about technological self-determination, names the specific Canadian organizations working on the issue, and closes with a call for farmers to use their political power -- citing the Grangers' 1890 fight with the railroads as the historical template that produced the Sherman Act. Cory closed by sharing he had just found out he is cancer-free, that enshittification entered the Oxford English Dictionary that week, and that his new…
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