John Deere is trying to retain <i>de facto</i> ownership of their tractors through an abuse of copyright law. Dissembling about &quot;selling&quot; a product that the customer cannot use as they desire (as long as they don&#x27;t <i>copy</i> the firmware) is fraud.<p>Also, except for circumventing any DMCA-covered &quot;protection&quot; on the firmware, you are not legally banned from modifying it. Use != copy. At best, you might be civilly <i>liable</i> for copyright violations.<p>The law that restricts what you can do with the AR-15 is (I believe) criminal law. Transmission power is similarly banned. (through executive regulation, I think?)<p>--<p>As for traffic control, common ownership is not only a terrible erosion of property rights, it also smells similar to border-security-only &quot;security&quot;. &quot;we can implement traffic control with common ownership&quot; sounds similar to &quot;we don&#x27;t need encryption because we have a firewall&quot;. The only thing central ownership gets you is a false sense of security.