“The Deere & Co. settlement illustrates that repair access and IP protection can be defined narrowly enough to coexist without either side simply prevailing over the other.”
When a farmer buys a tractor that costs a small fortune, who owns it?
The instinctive answer is the farmer. And if he owns the tractor, certainly he has the right to fix it, right?
Like most things in life, it’s not that simple. Modern equipment runs on software and other technologies that still belong, legally, to the company that built the machine. The manufacturer retains intellectual property rights in the equipment even after selling it, and those rights can get in the way of the farmer fixing his own machine. Both sides own something. Neither owns everything.
The right-to-repair debate has tended to treat that dispute as zero-sum. Consumer advocates have argued that “intellectual property rights” is just the label manufacturers put on a refusal to let anyone else touch a machine. Manufacturers, for their part, have warned that opening up repair tools paves the way for competitors to misappropriate their innovations—not to mention potential safety issues for users. Both concerns are genuine, and neither fully answers the other.
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) recent settlement with Deere & Company is worth examining because it suggests the dispute may be less zero-sum than the rhetoric on either side implies. The settlement may also provide a model for similar disputes going forward.
Ownership Has Two Sides
A modern combine carries electronic control units, embedded software, emissions sensors, and diagnostic tools that make it more productive and, at the same time, harder to fix without the manufacturer’s help. A grower may hold legal title to his tractor and still need to call a dealer to clear a fault code, pair a replacement sensor, or restart the machine after an emissions-related shutdown. If that call comes during planting or harvest, the delay has real economic consequences.
The FTC and five states sued Deere on January 15, 2025, alleging that the company restricted repair access and pushed farmers toward authorized dealers only. Deere denied wrongdoing. Andrew Ferguson, then an FTC commissioner and now its chairman, voted against filing the suit. Under his chairmanship, the two sides recently reached a proposed settlement.
For the next ten years, Deere must give farmers and independent repair shops access to the same repair resources it gives authorized dealers, on fair and reasonable terms—reading and clearing fault codes, reprogramming components, pairing replacement parts, and restarting equipment after certain emissions shutdowns, among other things.
Access Without Appropriation
One of the settlement’s most important clause’s may be the one that limits the settlement’s own scope. The order is explicit that licensing, subscribing to, or purchasing Deere’s repair resources does not transfer ownership of Deere’s intellectual property rights. The farmer owns the tractor. Deere retains rights in the code.
That distinction is important. The settlement gives farmers the ability to diagnose and repair their own equipment. It does not give them a copy of Deere’s source code, the right to redistribute its software, or any other claim to the underlying innovations. The access granted and the intellectual property rights retained are kept analytically separate, which is not always true of right-to-repair proposals more broadly.
The underlying rationale for that separation is familiar from intellectual property law: patents and copyrights are meant to incentivize firms to create new technologies. If manufacturers had to surrender rights in proprietary technologies whenever a repair was needed, the incentive to invest in those technologies may correspondingly weaken. There are, of course, ongoing debates about how much incentive is actually needed in any given context. But our patent and copyright systems are built on the incentives theory. And by most measures, despite its warts, the system has served innovative ecosystems reasonably well.
At the same time, intellectual property rights in one embedded component do not justify indefinite control over every repair the machine will ever require. A settlement that ignored this risk would leave “ownership” of a $500,000 combine looking more like a long-term rental from the manufacturer than ownership in any true sense.
The settlement’s commercial terms follow the same logic: Deere may charge for its repair resources through licenses, subscriptions, or direct sale, but the price has to be fair and reasonable, not simply whatever the market will bear.
A Model, With Limits
Deere had already begun moving in this direction before the settlement. In 2025 it introduced Operations Center PRO Service, offering equipment owners expanded diagnostic and repair capabilities. The settlement takes that voluntary offering and converts it into an enforceable, decade-long commitment.
Whether this template holds up elsewhere is a separate question. Farm equipment has features that make the compromise easier to strike than it might be in other industries: the repair functions at issue are relatively well-defined, and the safety stakes of a malfunctioning combine are lower than those of, say, a medical device. But software is already in nearly every other modern device or appliance, so the same basic tension between intellectual property and physical ownership will keep recurring. The balance struck here may be a useful model for those other situations, even if it does not map neatly onto every one of them.
What the settlement does illustrate is that repair access and IP protection can be defined narrowly enough to coexist without either side simply prevailing over the other. Buying a product that contains someone else’s intellectual property rights does not entitle the buyer to use those rights as they see fit. But owning intellectual property rights embedded in a product does not entitle a company to make ordinary maintenance permanently dependent on it, either. The Deere settlement does not fully resolve that dispute so much as manage it—which, for a tension this persistent and pervasive, may be the more realistic ambition.
But software is already in nearly every other modern device or appliance, so the same basic tension between intellectual property and physical ownership will keep recurring. Congress has been considering similar intervention for automobiles: the REPAIR Act (H.R. 1566), introduced in 2025 and still pending in committee, would bar automakers from withholding vehicle data and repair tools from independent shops, much as the Deere settlement does for farm equipment. A negotiated settlement can take effect immediately and adjust as technology changes; legislation, if it passes at all, would first require a federal rulemaking. The Deere settlement may thus be a useful model for other situations, even if it does not map neatly onto every one of them.
Image Source: Deposit Photos
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Author: BlueJay18