For example: Sony and Amazon can take away the digital books/games that you bought a copy for. Sony will do it if you ever enact your consumer rights to charge back for fraudulent activity. (See r/playstation on chargebacks) (I'm not just talking about the game/content in question.. I'm talking about your entire library)
EULA are designed to remove your existing legal rights to repair under current patent, copyright, and ownership law. Its the EULA that are unfair and deceptive -- which is why state consumer protection laws can restore your right to repair.
Whether it is to protect IP, to enable police-interception or to prevent you from cranking up you radio signal governments and companies have joint interest in ensuring gadgets don't always obey their users. Often for good reason.
Politicians therefore have a much stronger incentive to push for piece-meal regulations to get devices to do certain thigns (will sometimes be consumer-friendly) than to support a general right-to-tinker which can allow uses that powerful stakeholders (including the public) will dislike.
But whatever it is, more power to them. It is amazing what corporations have got away with since they got the Feds to stop enforcing the anti-trust legislation still on the books. Apparently there is this dodgy economic theory that says as long as prices don't seem to be soaring, monopoly power is harmless, even where it is demonstrably suppressing alternative products, some of which would be markedly better. And, even where prices soar, people might be better off for it, somehow. Or, the monopoly might not actually last forever if they get complacent enough. And so on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079
I wonder if it's a similar thing about the supposed benefits companies thought they were going to get about limiting the customers "right" to repair their products.
On one hand, the benefit look "obvious", yet when you take into consideration the second-hand effects (like bad publicity, people getting frustrated by the inability to repair and getting a cheaper alternative) my guess is the costs were bigger than the benefits.
If you plan not to repair you can skimp on all sorts of things (fasteners that break when you open them, clips that snap off, you can pump glue in etc) that actually lead to complete failure.
It's annoying, it's also hard (though the internet has helped) to get spares for things I can remember my father having no issue getting spares for, cooker elements, washing machine controllers and the like - I can remember when white goods came with a manual that had part codes to order those things in the back and I'm only 38, it's almost a form of learned helplessness.
It's clearly a local optimum, ideally you'd do the engineering to make repair cheap too, but I don't see how you climb out of it.
I.e. increase the cost of cheap disposable manufacturing so that making things repairable is the better economic decision (and better environmentally).
Right to repair is doomed if its proponents make it about the bottom line. You don't really know if this decent thing or another is going to increase or decrease revenue.
Making it about doing what's right for the consumer is great. But better to promote Right to Repair during the boom times, when everyone's making money, and say that it's good for the bottom line, even if you don't really know.
And therein lies the problem. People who are great consumer advocates are terrible liars.
I ended up buying a battery on iFixit (I had already replaced the battery of my previous model), only to realize that iFixit wasn't selling Apple parts anymore. The "aftermarket battery" I now have is less that ideal, and apparently there's no way to source an OEM battery anymore.
So it's nice we have the right to tinker with our machines, but if there are no spare parts, the point is moot :-/
Seriously, how much "positive" spin can be tolerated at this point? We are in a tsunami of consumer-product waste.. some of it with notable components.. the markets are failing to balance the industrial life cycles.. This is exactly part of a giant fail by humans in geologic time, to adapt to sustainable patterns.
"It remains to be seen if we have poisoned the nest"
I think right to repair, open source hardware and 3d printers are going to be critical if we hope to turn around our throwaway society. It makes me so sad to see average people throwing out perfectly fine electronics because the OEM stopped supporting them or the battery got old.
A few of the people in this thread are suggesting that you should simply not buy these bad devices but the fact is unless everyone stops there is no hope for the environment.
A whole device can be brought down by something simple like a dead capacitor which can be replaced in minutes. Without being able to debug that they'd just end up in landfill.
It's incredibly hard to build a successful product. Just look at the Pebble or other Kickstarter graveyard entries. I would never in my right mind tell Apple to build anything - if I could, I'd be richer than them. I know they have their reasons for designing things the way they do. As a consumer, I am thankful for amazing tech that pretty much works as expected. Telling them how to build their amazing products, which would just make them worse, is the pinnacle of narcissism.
And in many cases the OEMs have all the parts to fix things, will happily want to fix things, but won't sell them except through their overpriced 1st party service -- or even build into the hardware repair-detecting and disabling countermeasures (like Apple or John Deere does with some hardware iirc).
It seems like asking for the very basic right.
Even from the industrial side, reversible manufacturing is usually the best way to design a product -- it wouldn't surprise if some manufacturers (particular for products that don't have enough competition) go out of their way to make their hardware difficult to repair -- e.g. using glue instead of screws, complicating assembly, etc. An easy, reversible assembly process should be expected to cost less; using screws is much easier to automate, debug and qualify than glue; and so on.
Asking for the right to repair, and availability of parts/manuals when reasonable, seems like a very healthy, pro-efficiency, pro-competition move.
I had a control board go bad on an $800 washing machine. The manufacturer wanted $829 for the control board (just the part).
I am not necessarily advocating for either side, just observing that this is about limitation on design as well as rights.
They’re not specifying a type of screw. They’re just saying to use screws instead of glue, make a product possible to disassemble and reassemble without causing it to necessarily break on disassembly.
I’m not hugely in love with the idea of placing legal limitations on designers, but we’re taking about mass market consumer and commercial goods, generally measured in at a minimum, thousands produced and hopefully sold. They’re manufactured in factories that at their best are barely better than sweatshops in countries where the workers have fewer rights and lower wages and sold to people with more money, rights and priveleges. Jony Ive might not be happy if he has to modify his designs to meet a legislative mandate, but I just don’t care. The factories aren’t going to care, they’ll accommodate any change they have to. The factory workers aren’t going to care if they using screws or glue. Customers are going to care then if they can replace their widgets for a lot less money than it takes to buy a new widget. I know I’ll care about that, and I’ll look back with disdain on those few times I simply couldn’t get something repaired and had to replace it.
The market being full of disposable shit sucks. I have plates, ceramic dinnerware, silverware, glassware, cast iron pans and pots that I would like to some day pass on to my descendants because why not? They can sell it on to someone who needs it more, use it themselves, maybe if one breaks it can become part of a mosaic or something nice. I can’t think of a single electronic I own that might, might, serve some useful purpose, and even appliances with the additional and often unnecessary silicon in them are iffy.
If right to repair laws can change the status quo, I am all for that. If that means I’m not doing my part to inflate the economy with higher numbers by wasting more money to more companies to inflate their numbers for shit that will break in an unreasonably short amount of time relative to my lifetime, I think I can live with myself.
> you can always...... just not buy
Even better: you can buy something that is fixable. That way you get the enjoyment of having it, and can still fix it when it breaks.
>Even better: you can buy something that is fixable. That way you get the enjoyment of having it, and can still fix it when it breaks.
GP is right there. It's the first tenant of the 3-R's: Reduce. Or I guess one could consider repair as Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling, depending how you look at it.
I think the word you really wanted there was "tenet".
Would be a shame if something happened to it.
;)
I would say it is a pinnacle of waste-reduction. We need to put the days of 'disposability' behind us or we are doomed as a species.
Brakes and other wear parts are easy even on modern cars and the modern ones seem to just need way less.
I remember equipment from the late 70s and earlier would have full circuit schematics and repair howtos... On the inside of the case. It was expected and all manufacturers did it...
Until microprocessors got cheaper. That previous circuit diagram was replaced with closed source unreparible microchips. And the code was then copyrighted, with all the ils of copyright law and illegality of sharing.
This was quickly turned to the norm, having sealed closed devices with "no user serviceable parts". The right to repair is to turn this trend around. Its about the right to repair it themselves and share how. Further is that the companies make repairable things. A switch or battery should not trash a device.
The 4th R is the first R: Repair, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. That's the R we should be focusing on.
It's a crime that we've lost all those services and the technicians. Throwaway is a disease.
Now, we have wealth upon wealth with technology of all sorts. But those things are sealed with alu lids over the board. Or this talks to the cloud. Or that is glued together with ultrasonic sealing so opening = destroying. Or batteries are buried with ultrasonic and glue and spot-welding. They're made intentionally user-unservicable.
All of it means that you have a snowball's chance in hell in fixing it. And yes, SMT is servicable. So is through-hole. And if these companies provided their pinouts for flying probe or provided probe posts, we could check what part or system is acting up. If we knew their voltages, then following that as a test would be easy. Or someone could re-solder that Atmel 328p DIP (or Arm, or PIC) after using a programmer to reprogram and then use it.
Instead, we see flat screens hauled down to the dumpster. DVD and blurays are dumped. Computers of all sorts and types, that likely have a single miniscule flaw "destroy" the whole device. It makes the game great for consumer culture: consume consume CONSUME! Companies can make shoddy stuff that has a MBTF "warranty + 1 day", and whoops that cap or vreg blows.
Seeing that e-waste makes me cry. I know how much resources are put into that via how much I paid, and I also know how much of that is externalized to our environment.. and Mother Earth's account is going lower and lower. I don't need that new thing. I just want to fix that thing that broke that necessitated me to get the new.
Most everything I own lasts longer than I care to use it. (For context on that, I just replaced my iPhone 5S this month with a used 8, so I’m willing to run equipment quite a while.)
What does break before I care to get rid of is >50% electrolytic capacitor failures, which are generally easily repaired without a schematic. Beyond that, most anything is BER (beyond economic repair), even for someone who is capable of and interested in component level repair. I’m just not going to tear into a $500 TV beyond a caps issue. If I had to take it to a service center, it’s going to be $200 to take a look at it past the power supply.
> legalizing cell phone unlocking in Congress, getting the FTC to rule “warranty void if removed” stickers null and void, and convincing the US Copyright office to grant a number of repair exemptions to federal copyright law.
There are two parts to Right to Repair -- one is getting companies to design products that can be repaired, but even more basic is getting rid of companies' ability to use the law itself to shut down 3rd parties from fixing or modifying things they own.
I don't buy when people say that Right to Repair is just about telling companies what to do. Even if you're staunchly against regulation, there is still plenty of deregulatory work the movement does that you should be able to get behind. You don't have to agree with literally everything the movement says to advocate that it's anti-consumer, crony-capitalism crap that John Deer can use copyright law to ban farmers from fixing their own tractors.
I mean if you fear someone would steal your IP then they can buy your product and scan it and they also can get the schematics from an employee from your authorized repair shop. For me is obvious that "We don't want to give the repair schematics and we will go after you for using or sharing them" is not to prevent some company stealing your IP but screwing with the repair shops even if we know that eventually you will get around this
