Review - HR 5857 Introduced – FARM Act

Last month Rep Perez (D,WA) introduce HR 5857, the Freedom for Agricultural Repair and Maintenance (FARM) Act. The bill would require original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to provide owners and repair providers with the tools, parts, and documentation required “for use in order to diagnose, maintain, or repair farm equipment”. It would make the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) responsible for enforcing rules related to the requirements of this legislation. No additional funding authorization is provided in the bill.

This bill is similar in intent and scope to HR 5604, the Agricultural Right to Repair Act, that was introduced by Perez in September 2023. No further action was taken on that bill in the 118^th Congress. Most of the changes were differences in wording that would be of interest only to litigators, but there were two significant differences. First HR 5857 added definitions of two new terms; ‘maintenance’, and ‘repair’, as well as removing the definition of the term ‘embedded software’. Secondly, it added potential civil penalties to the FTC enforcement provisions.

Moving Forward

Neither Perez, nor any of her three cosponsors, are members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that there would not be enough influence to see this bill considered in Committee. While I expect that this bill would have significant bipartisan support in the agricultural community (and that is a large block of Congress), there would be significant opposition to the provisions of this bill among original equipment manufacturers and their authorized dealers. The Ag community support in the Energy and Commerce Committee (selected for primary consideration because of the FTC provisions in the bill) would probably not be strong enough to overcome the OEM influences. I doubt that this bill would be reported favorably in that Committee without significant changes being made.

Commentary

An important provision (for the purposes of this blog at least) is quietly buried in §3(c)(1)(C). It specifically allows for security researchers to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under” the copyright protections of 17 USC. Allowing such researchers access to the underlying software for the purposes of identifying vulnerabilities is an important part of the right-to-repair movement. I was very happy to see this provision included in the bill.

 

For more information about the provisions of this bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-5857-introduced-farm-act - subscription required.