Sponsors (4)
The bill expands owners' and independent repairers' legal access to parts, tools, and software—reducing downtime, costs, and improving transparency and safety—while raising risks of higher equipment prices, intellectual-property/cybersecurity exposure, and added regulatory and litigation burdens for manufacturers and smaller firms.
Farmers, equipment owners, and independent repair shops can obtain parts, tools, software/firmware, and documentation on fair terms (including legal use of circumvention tools), reducing downtime, lowering repair costs, and expanding local repair options.
Owners — especially in rural areas — retain the ability to repair equipment offline because the bill prohibits forced device pairing, forced registration, or internet-only access, reducing service interruptions where connectivity is limited.
Allows qualified security research and vulnerability testing and prohibits disabling safety/emissions notifications, helping identify and reduce cyber and safety risks in agricultural equipment and protecting public safety and environmental compliance.
Buyers — including farmers and small operators — may face higher equipment prices or capital costs because OEMs could pass compliance costs, expanded disclosure obligations, or penalties onto customers.
Broad access to firmware, tools, and circumvention methods and DMCA carve-outs could weaken intellectual-property protections and reduce OEM incentives to invest in software innovation, while also increasing cybersecurity and IP-exposure risks if sensitive components are widely distributed.
Expanded FTC authority, daily civil penalties, and new enforcement mechanisms increase regulatory and litigation risks and compliance burdens for OEMs and other businesses, which could particularly threaten smaller firms' financial stability.
Based on analysis of 6 sections of legislative text.
Requires farm equipment makers to supply parts, tools, documentation, software, firmware, and owner data to owners and independent repairers on fair, reasonable terms, and creates DMCA repair carve-outs.
Official title: To require original equipment manufacturers to make available certain documentation, parts, software, and tools with respect to farm equipment, and for other purposes.
Introduced October 28, 2025 by Marie Gluesenkamp Perez · Last progress October 28, 2025
Requires farm equipment manufacturers to provide owners and independent repair providers with parts, tools, documentation, software/firmware, and owner-generated equipment data on fair and reasonable terms so equipment can be diagnosed, maintained, updated, and repaired. The bill also creates carve-outs to the DMCA to allow necessary circumvention for repair, interoperability, security research, and non-infringing modification of equipment-control software. Enforcement is assigned to the Federal Trade Commission, which may treat violations as unfair or deceptive acts and levy tiered civil penalties for repeated refusals; the agency must publish implementing rules consistent with federal emissions laws. The law protects trade secrets to the extent necessary, and prohibits changes that would permanently disable safety or emissions compliance systems.