More than a dozen states have introduced legislation that would give consumers more control over the electronics that they buy. Under “right to repair” laws, tech manufacturers would be required to provide manuals, documentation, and, in many cases, parts for purchase in order to allow consumers and third-party companies to repair their electronic devices.
The laws are modeled after similar legislation that requires automakers to provide parts for purchase and documentation on how to fix various parts of their vehicles, including the electronics. The original right-to-repair law for car owners was passed in Massachusetts in 2012. This led to a national agreement with the auto industry, which collectively agreed to adhere to the Massachusetts law nationwide.
Fifteen states in 2019 have introduced similar bills targeting consumer electronics, with hearings on several of them set to begin this week.
The main obstacle to these laws comes from companies like Apple and John Deere, which argue that publishing repair documents would expose their intellectual property and that customers could inadvertently do damage to the product. John Deere has argued, through a lobbying group, that modern farming equipment is too complex for farmers to fix on their own and they could end up hurting themselves or others. In California, John Deere controls the access to repairs as well as what information is available, forcing farmers to go through expensive dealerships for issues that could be cheap fixes.
It’s this kind of repair monopoly that right-to-repair bills seek to tackle. In late 2018, relief came at the federal level when the U.S. Copyright Office ruled an exemption be made regarding the circumvention of “copyright protection systems.” Previously, consumers could get into legal trouble for merely cracking open their iPhones, even to do something as simple as replace the battery, due to a provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that prohibited bypassing measures meant to deny access to copyrighted work. That statute was designed to fight the piracy of movies, music, and other digital content by turn-of-the-century file-sharing services like Limewire and Napster.
The exemption was based on the recommendation of the copyright office’s acting register, who reviewed the prohibition as having “an adverse effect on users’ ability to make noninfringing uses of particular classes of copyrighted works.”
The Copyright Office decision ensures that people can’t face legal ramifications for tinkering. That’s where state right-to-repair bills come in — to carry the cause the rest of the way.
“We’re starting to lose the ability to fix just about anything,” said Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association, a consumer advocacy group. “If it’s got a chip in it, it’s turned into something that is untouchable. Nobody ever planned on this, it just kinda snuck up on us. You’ll have the exact same problem with just about anything else you’ll buy. A thermostat, to hot tub controls, to a refrigerator, you name it.”
Tech manufacturers have made it harder and harder to get into things like Amazon’s Alexa speakers by not only sealing them using different forms of adhesives but also using special screws and requiring specific tools that the companies try to keep in-house and out of the public’s hands. Legislation would make it so manufacturers would be required to make these tools and parts available for purchase for individuals or third-party repair companies.
Right-to-repair laws could potentially force companies like Apple and Microsoft to lower their service prices, in order to compete with independent repair stores. This would make it more viable for customers to have the products they own fixed rather than buying replacements, which Gordon-Byrne argues is another motivating factor for companies to hire lobbyists to kill bills before they hit the state legislative floors.
“They really, really, really want to force people to buy new,” Gordon-Byrne said. “It’s their business model. They’ve always wanted people to buy new. It’s why their marketing budgets are so huge. [The used market] was the best competition out there. If you were going to spend $5 million on a new one when you could buy a literally one generation behind for $2 million, that’s a huge savings. If you block repair, you also block that used market, so now you have total control. The customer is stuck.”
