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The US Government Wants To Permanently Legalize the Right To Repair (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In one of the biggest wins for the right to repair movement yet, the U.S. Copyright Office suggested Thursday that the U.S. government should take actions to make it legal to repair anything you own, forever -- even if it requires hacking into the product's software. Manufacturers -- including John Deere, Ford, various printer companies, and a host of consumer electronics companies -- have argued that it should be illegal to bypass the software locks that they put into their products, claiming that such circumvention violated copyright law. Thursday, the U.S. Copyright Office said it's tired of having to deal with the same issues every three years; it should be legal to repair the things you buy -- everything you buy -- forever. "The growing demand for relief under section 1201 has coincided with a general understanding that bona fide repair and maintenance activities are typically non infringing," the report stated. "Repair activities are often protected from infringement claims by multiple copyright law provisions." "The Office recommends against limiting an exemption to specific technologies or devices, such as motor vehicles, as any statutory language would likely be soon outpaced by technology," it continued.
this has nothing to do with glued together devices.
It's the copyright office saying they want to to be clear that hacking the software on your device to repair it doesn't violate copyright, even if you have to hack the DRM.
It's more to do with Apple's "Error 53"
Considering the fact that Obama was trying to ram TPP through, trying to blame this on the Republicans and Trump is ridiculous.
First of all, realize that the TPP is NOT about free trade. It's about intellectual property control and a variety of other topics. "Free trade" is a generic cover for the whole thing. The real motivators are things that would be balked at if they were negotiated separately.
For details as to what TPP really IS about, well, here's a very short summary:
The TPP and Intellectual Property
And the EFF's position on it:
EFF on TPP
EFF and the Copyright Trap
I'm not going to go into a lot of research for that particular question since this has already been hashed out a million times before.
However, as for the Democrat portion... well, first off, Obama spearheaded TPP and intended to try to get it rammed through towards the end of his term.
Obama and the TPP
Hillary in fact praised it as the "gold standard" while it was in development (in secret, I might add, to the point where Congressmen had to go to a secure room to look at the drafts and could not keep their notes on it with them):
Hillary on the Gold Standard
TPP Secrecy (note the caption on the picture)
Now she did try to back off on this and flip-flopped, although this might well have been a pose for the campaign:
Hillary and TPP
But the fact is that the Democrats did not officially oppose it.
Rejecting formal TPP opposition
Some would say that the fact that Hillary is particularly likely to lie about this to get elected, even among politicians. But people specifically close to her indicated that, if she was elected, she'd flip-flop on it pretty rapidly.
Terry McAuliffe's view on TPP flipping
Additionally, while people seem to very much enjoy shitting on the Republicans for draconian copyright laws, fact is that the Democrats are just as bad, and in some cases, worse:
Congressional support for SOPA and PIPA
This raises doubts as to what parts of TPP would be "renegotiated," if that had happened, which was one option that seemed to be spoken of for a Hillary presidency. Suffice it to say that it is likely that the IP law portions would not receive renegotiation that would be considered consumer-friendly.
Stereotypical "Republicans are evil 'cuz Republicans" and "Trump is evil 'cuz Trump" is not going to fly here, unless you're also willing to jump on board the "Democrats are evil 'cuz Democrats" train. Fact of the matter is, both sides are bought and paid for by the technology and content generation industries. This was the sentiment when SOPA was defeated by massive Internet backlash:
Backlash after massive SOPA protests
And Democrats were certainly benefiting from Hollywood donations which "encouraged" them to support SOPA:
So in short, both sides are filthy here. You can blame one side or the other for the majority of the problem a