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Big Tech Lobbying Is On the Verge of Killing Right To Repair Legislation In Minnesota (vice.com)
Jason Koebler, writing for Motherboard: Statehouse employees in Minnesota say that lobbying efforts by big tech companies and John Deere are on the verge of killing right to repair legislation in the state that would have made it easier for consumers and small businesses to fix their electronics. According to two of the bill's sponsors, the bill, which would have introduced "fair repair" requirements for manufacturers in the state, will not get a hearing that's necessary to move the legislation forward. Minnesota Senate rules automatically kills any bills that do not have a hearing scheduled by a certain date (this year, it's March 10). Last year, tech industry lobbying killed a similar bill in New York. "Unfortunately, it's not going to make deadline this session," Republican Sen. David Osmek, one of the sponsors, told me in an email. Osmek would not give additional specifics about his colleagues' concerns with the bill, but a legislative assistant for the bill's other sponsor told me that electronic manufacturer lobbying is likely to blame, while another source close to the legislature told me that tractor manufacturer John Deere -- a long time enemy of fair repair -- helped kill the bill as well.
Everybody is in Nebraska right now, I think the hearing is today or tomorrow.
Start our own equipment company, with full parts availability and no lock-in. They'll be selling like hotcakes!
AC comments get piped to
Replace "right to repair" with "right to work" and they will suddenly support it. You have to be careful about what rights you give people. There are bad rights, and there are good rights.
If those companies don't want to have customers being able to repair their equipments/electronics, these should be the conditions (I read this on another site):
- 5 year minimum hardware warranty
- 3 years phone support on software (included or embedded)
- Security updates for as long as the hardware is expected to last*, and if not provided, company must provide a new 'current product' replacement free of charge (with full warranty)
(*)"expected to last" means that if the product would normally continue to function, but been designed to fail/have its life shortened prematurely, then a replacement is also warranted. Example given was limiting the battery charge cycle to 3000 cycles when the battery could do 7000 cycles, limiting the useful life of the product (because the battery couldn't be swapped out because the device is a sealed unit).
AC comments get piped to
and how much ?
Apple or the tech companies that are the targets it's the farm equipment manufacturers and auto manufacturers who want to lock down diagnostic and repair.
Movement ever so gently. Soon you will lose your last 4 or 5 freedoms you still have. He who has the money makes the rules. Bring on the robots and dump us in the sea.
I used to like John Deere until this shit happened. Now they're right up there with Apple and Disney on my Fuck You list.
The lobyists, that is.
It's high time bribery was punished like the crime of government corruption it's supposed to be.
Red states' wet dreams involve small independent farming families sustaining themselves by the sweat of their brow independently.
If it helps pass good laws, sure. But it's worth pointing out that such people are myths now if they weren't always. There are two million farms in the us, and they're mostly mega corporation farms now. In a nation of 300 million people, that's really an insignificant part of the US.
I would guess that there are orders of magnitude more people who would be interesting in being able to fix their iphone screen than there are small farmers who are just trying to replace the parts on pa's old tractor with money and parts from under the old feather mattress.
Pass a bill saying "except for farm equipment." John Deere lobbyists will back off, the vast majority of Minnesotans will be able to fix their electronics, everyone wins except for some mega farm corporations who can afford it anyway and big tech. Not the most satisfying outcome, but seriously, give it up with the small farmer bit. They're not worth worrying about even though the right wing acts like they're the only true Americans.
They can spend a lot of stockholder's money fighting this, and it could end up in the Supreme Court.
But in the end, even if they win the court case, they will lose the marketplace.
Their customers have enough problems without this kind of abuse.
The stock is currently VERY OVER-RATED.
GOOD TIME TO SELL !!!!!
exercise it, before this one goes too.
You can still repair anything you want, and you can pay anyone you want to repair your device, you just can't expect the company to warranty your device afterwards.
Deere, of course, is in it's own level of Hell, far away from Dell and Apple. Deere's tractors can be in the field for twenty or more years. They just want turn over. The Best Buys of the state (literally Best Buy in this case) wrote the bill a little too broad and so attracted the interest of Deere.
Killing the bill in this case is a Good Thing(tm) because it can be tightened up to just consumer devices.
Works great, and if you're profitable you can go public. Once you are public you'll have a board. And if John Deere offers your board $1B to buy them out, they can undo the original purpose of your business. It will all be perfectly legal.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you don't own it, you can't repair it.
If you can't repair it, you don't own it.
Blame the politicians who took their money to kill the bill, and ultimately blame the people who reelect them. There is no hope unless they are voted out.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why can't we blame all of the above?
This is a good example of our corrupt political and economic system.
We have corporations who find it profitable to restrict customer access to the products they make.
Customers want to be able to fix the stuff they've bought so they try to get the politicians to pass a law.
Corporations don't want this law so they pay off the politicians who promptly forget about their constituents and pocket the money.
Corporations and politicians working together to increase profits... screw the citizens.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Appliance makers are transitioning to 3-year built-in obsolescence designs. That means you will have to repair or replace 50% of your appliances every three years! And of course it will almost always be cheaper to replace. In fact, that is their excuse for why this is better -- initial prices will be lower. See how clever they are?
:T:R:A:N:S:
Though I HATE Wired, they have this to say:
Last Friday [Oct 28, 2016], a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA’s ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue them. One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles.
TFA
Just goes to prove yet again that America has the finest democracy money can buy.
Call it what it actually is with these ridiculous anti-consumer rules. If I can't do what I please with hardware I *bought*, I didn't really buy it, did I?
This is silly. Since when can Somalians repair electronics?
Looks like more and more issues (Medical insurance, Right to repair, ) should be brought forward in the form of constitutional amendments. Power to the people!
Enjoy your crony capitalism!
your comment is stupid.
Of course this bill wouldn't pass. You can't demand, from a company, all their IP and that they go through the trouble and expense of publishing and maintaining technical documents to give to you for free. And maintaining a supply chain of parts, especially obsolete ones, isn't a cheap endeavor. A company may do this if they choose to, but it isn't fair to demand it as a legal requirement. And if it were, it wouldn't benefit consumers anyways because companies would have to raise prices and/or drop marginally profitable products from the market.
All the bill should require is that companies don't take active steps to sabotage consumer performed repairs. If you want to open something up and swap parts from a spare device, replace firmware with something from the internet, or use after market replacement parts- that's all fine. THAT is what the bill should protect.
It's so sad that Slashdot is so full of people who love to fellate corporations now.
You don't need constitutional amendments for each and every issue. To need a single constitutional amendment to limit influence of the massive amount of lobbyist and donor cash that has flowed into government since 1980.
The amount influence corporate cash has on the system is the problem that is behind every major problem we have, whether it is health care, right to repair, or massive amount of money we are spending on national defence. The situation looks a whole hell of a lot like we have no representation... that is we have representation in name only. My Congressional rep sure as hell doesn't care about his constituents. It's all about the donor culture now. If we are smart we would working to change THAT.
The GOP now claims to be the party that represents rural America. In MN they have the majority of both the state house and state senate. If the state senate committee was divided up to match the division of the chamber itself, then the GOP only needed to convince one or two democrats to approve the bill past committee in order to get it up to a vote in the chamber.
If they couldn't bring themselves to work with the democrats enough to get just one or two senators to approve the bill to go past committee, they have nothing to bitch about. This should not have been a difficult bill to get moved forward. More likely they are getting their wheels greased by the farm implement industry just as much (if not more) than the democrats and as a result they couldn't be bothered to put any real effort into seeing this bill go through; it was in their interest to just make a statement by saying they wrote and proposed it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
rental so the landlord needs to pay for repairs and maintenance
A couple of years ago I undertook to read the complete output of the science fiction writer H. Beam Piper, who died in 1964. For most of his career he was a bottom-of-the-pack pro-writer, managing to get published regularly but never quite making enough to quit his job as a laborer in the Altoona PA railroad yards.
That's because for the most of his career he was a technically mediocre writer. His stories, taken on their own, were adequate for the most part. But if you look at his stories as a body, they're quite spectacular, envisioning a consistent history stretching thirty thousand years into the future (and some direction laterally if you count his "paratime" stories).
We take this kind of "world building" for granted in the post-LotR era; many aspiring writers start by creating elaborate historical backstories. What set Piper apart from these naval-gazing wannabes is that his future history is built around a single, central idea: nothing ever works for long. Sooner or later some people stop doing the things that system needs to be done because they've forgot why it should be done; or other people figure out ways to game the system; or both.
His stories always end on a happy, hopeful note, but if you fit it into the timeline with the next story it turns out that everything must have gone to hell in the end.
In many ways what we are seeing looks like the Piperian historical senescence of American small-r republicanism. Some people have stopped doing some of the things the system needs (informing themselves and dealing with opposing viewpoints). Others have figured out how to game the system (buying politicians without legally appearing to do so; flooding the mediasphere with bullshit).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You're confusing Corporate Statism with Fascism.
Fascism is simply an authoritarian government that asserts the superiority or rightness of a national identity, and strives to take power away from anyone that does not fit their ideal blueprint. Usually the platform for a fascist is positioned as a way to protect the country from outside enemies. And to bring a nation back to the culture and tradition that liberalism has destroyed. Of course the narrative might be imaginary, but it is always presented as a firmly understood fact.
Some fascist leaders may choose to nationalize businesses (socialized economy), others may choose to privatize services and establish panels of industry leaders that are placed under the fascist government. But how that goes down isn't necessarily particular to fascism. And you can end up in similar situations with class based Leninism or any number of Oligarchies, such as Plutocracy or Military Junta.
PS - Nepotism with a little Kleptocracy is how I'd describe the ill defined "crony capitalism"
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
ought to be outlawed. False representation of facts, enablers of bribes, perks and such...
We have laws over here about companies being obliged to sell parts for 10 years after a product is discontinued (I'm thinking about cars, things might be different for computers).
It is conceivable that an American corporation selling here would have to comply with our legislation and, at the same time, be exempt from doing the same in the USA.
Or the corporation could choose to cease operations...
Dear fellow citizen:
Don't you think it is time that governments actually SERVE THE PUBLIC?!
Then why the fuck are you voting these assholes into office?!
And, if an election was stolen, then why aren't you participating in the revolt about it?!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.