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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.
Start our own equipment company, with full parts availability and no lock-in. They'll be selling like hotcakes!
AC comments get piped to
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.
You already have the right to not buy a product if you don't like the terms offered.
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.
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?
The problem is when there is an effective cooperative oligopoly, or a monopoly.
Have you tried to buy a phone case for something that isn't an iPhone lately? The iPhone is the current standard for accessories, so if you want accessories you're under heavy pressure to buy Apple.
When that kind of thing happens, you can either allow the market to drift towards an abusive monopoly or you can attempt to correct things legislatively.
And 'right-to-repair'... well, that should be the playing field for all manufacturers regardless of the amount of weight they carry. The idea that you can be sold an object but not actually have complete ownership rights over it is ridiculous. That idea becoming fact is obscene.
Making products deliberately difficult to service or alter, then lobbying for laws to prohibit circumventing those artificial difficulties is not something that should be tolerated in a free society. Not for printer ink, not for gaming consoles, and not for tractors.
You already have the right to not buy a product if you don't like the terms offered.
So by buying a product, you forfeit that right? Because that's basically what these companies are lobbying for.
Funny, but I don't see the text anywhere saying I'm forfeiting that when I paid for the product that I own.
AC comments get piped to
One problem here is that a lot of this stuff isn't made plainly clear to customers before purchase. They certainly aren't going to advertise, "our products are specifically engineered so that you can't work on them, and you'll have to pay a small fortune for our technicians to come fix them in the field for you!". (Or, with more consumer-type goods like cars, "our cars are specifically designed so you can't even change your own oil, and it has to be done at the dealership at inflated prices!")
There should be a law that this stuff should be made clear to the potential customer, so that they can compare brands based on these factors.
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:
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.
Wrong. See the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975.
Manufacturers can only refuse to honor warranties if they can prove that your repair is what caused the problem.
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
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!
This is not about smartphones and computers, although right-to-repair would benefit every owner of these devices. It's a battle going on in every farm state over being able to repair farm equipment.
That works out great unless the all the companies that supply the product are conspiring together as is the case with farm equipment.
A big part of the issue is that farm equipment has become so expensive and so complicated that to make it affordable they prevent users from servicing the equipment to recoup costs in repairs. It's the printer and ink way of doing business. Farmers don't really own the equipment. They're leasing it. And while you can do your own repairs on a leased vehicle, it's generally a bad idea. And when the vehicle costs millions of dollars, it's a really bad idea.
Sure, you can buy an older tractor. But the cost of food is so low that you won't be able to grow or harvest enough with your fix it yourself tractor to make a living.
Work Safe Porn
Rights are a very human concept. In reality, you have the rights you take and can defend, and that is the law of nature. It's a dog-eat-dog world and survival of the fittest, and the universe owes you nothing. Your right to life extends only as far as your ability to defend your life. If you are prey it's because you are not strong enough to be predator.
While you're right on one level, on another level you're wrong.
People are a social animal and we can act as a group and defend each others rights. As a group, our right to life actually extends as far as the group has the ability to defend members of the groups life. Other rights are similar, if the group decides that freedom of speech should be defended, the group can defend the individuals right to speech. Of course there are still conflicts such as this article where the right to profit is up against property rights
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
This is not about smartphones and computers, although right-to-repair would benefit every owner of these devices. It's a battle going on in every farm state over being able to repair farm equipment.
The problem is, the bill won't be crafted finely-enough to place a distinction between classes of devices, such as cellphones, which just CAN'T be repaired by most people with commonly-available and relatively inexpensive tools (who wants to buy an SMT rework station to replace that BGA-packaged SoC?), and a John Deere tractor, which can.
This will result in a bunch of idiots suing Apple, Samsung, HTC, etc. for a DECADE to try and force them to publish Service Manuals and provide "Spare Parts" for the (still unrepairable for most people, no matter what the law says) smartphones and other asininely-complicated embedded products, and to no real eventual outcome other than making some lawyers rich(er).
Believe me when I say that I agree that, what John Deere and other farm equipment companies is as dickish as it gets; but there really IS a vast-difference between repairing a tractor with a 10 mm Socket Wrench, and repairing a smartphone with a bad Flash chip. Yes, fundamentally, they are both "repairs"; but that is about ALL they have in common.
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.