Sponsors (3)
Introduced October 28, 2025 by Peter Welch · Last progress October 28, 2025
The bill expands owners' and independent repairers' access to parts, tools, and documentation—lowering repair costs and reducing lockouts—while attempting to protect trade secrets and safety, but it creates risks of higher equipment prices, safety/privacy issues, and legal disputes as manufacturers and regulators adjust.
Farm and equipment owners, and independent repair providers, gain broad access to OEM parts, tools, firmware, and documentation on fair terms, lowering repair costs and downtime and increasing competition in repair services.
Independent repair shops and equipment owners receive legal protection to use circumvention tools and access necessary diagnostic capabilities for repair, reducing legal risk for third-party servicing and enabling interoperability and security research.
Owners and repairers can obtain firmware, bills of materials, and documentation and can enable/disable maintenance-related security functions where appropriate, helping timely servicing, equipment longevity, emissions compliance, and operator safety when performed correctly.
Owners and taxpayers could face higher equipment prices or reduced manufacturer support if OEMs recoup lost exclusive-repair revenue or higher compliance costs by raising prices or cutting R&D and after-sales services.
Allowing broader access and circumvention tools risks improper or malicious alterations to safety-critical controls, which could increase injury, equipment failures, or environmental harms if repairs are done incorrectly or exploited by bad actors.
Broad availability of firmware, diagnostic tools, and owner-generated equipment data raises intellectual-property, trade-secret, and privacy concerns (including sensitive location/operational data) and creates risk of IP exposure or misuse.
Based on analysis of 6 sections of legislative text.
Requires farm equipment manufacturers to provide owners and independent repairers access to parts, tools, documentation, software/firmware, and owner data on fair and reasonable terms and relaxes anti‑circumvention limits for those activities.
Requires makers of farm equipment to give equipment owners and independent repair providers access to the parts, tools, documentation, software/firmware, and owner-generated equipment data needed to diagnose, maintain, upgrade, reprogram, or repair farm equipment on "fair and reasonable" terms. It creates a legal exception to anti‑circumvention rules so repairs and security research can proceed, directs the FTC to enforce violations as unfair or deceptive practices with escalating civil penalties, and requires the FTC to issue implementing rules consistent with Clean Air Act requirements. The bill protects trade secrets to the extent necessary, forbids use to enable illegal safety or emissions modifications, and limits how the law may change private contracts or require disclosure beyond repair needs. Owners, independent repair shops, and small rural businesses would gain legal access to repair materials and tools; manufacturers would face new disclosure and access obligations and potential daily penalties for noncompliance. The FTC is charged with rulemaking and enforcement to implement these duties and to ensure conformity with emissions and safety rules.