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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.
The Republican congress and the POTUS have way too many connections to big business to allow such a thing to happen. Expect the U.S. Copyright Office to be set straight as soon as tomorrow on this job killing philosophy.
What ever happened to the populace deciding the direction of society rather than the Government or US Corporations?
--(the REAL) Beau--
Uummmmmmmm, last time I checked the "Government" IS the populace. So nothing happened to it. It's right there doing what it's supposed to do.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, only part of the US government wants this. The part that makes the laws only wants to change this if they are getting an incentive to do so. If it doesn't promote their ability for reelection or directly impact them then congress really isn't interested. That's the harsh reality of the current state of our legislature.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Silly valley will chip in too:
The USPO has stated they want this for all the things, this includes the things made by silly valley. The moguls of silly valley will not like that. It does not matter that Ford and John Deer are not part of silly valley culture, their interests will coincide.
Expect the likes of Google, amazon, Microsoft, etc to be against this, because many of the things they do to "secure" their products (Xbox, home, Alexa, etc) introduce technological locks to prevent modifications, which also precludes service and repair. Things like the DVD firmware being tied to a specific xbox, etc. This move would shake things up in that kind of model. Microsoft and pals would have to start relying more on contract law instead of copyright law, and could not abuse the DMCA the way they gave grown accustomed to.
The logical next step is to allow jail breaking of repaired devices that the OEM refuses to provide service for, so that alternative services can be provided, which would undermine the position of power enjoyed by abusing contract law--, if you don't agree to their terms and conditions, you can use an alternative service provider. Naturally, that is very undesirable to Apple, Microsoft, and pals.
It does not take a genius to see how silly valley will react with horror to this announcement, and seek seemingly unlikely alliances to squash it.
But you were too busy trying to paint everything with Ds and Rs, now weren't you? Money does not really care about those things. It has no allegiance to anything but itself. Remember that.
If you really drill down into the story and the linked documents, you will find that the official statement from the USPTO that wants to permanently legalize the right to repair was prepared by the previous head of the patent office Michelle K. Lee (Obama appointee) and signed by Karyn Temple Claggett (Obama appointee) who became acting head of USPTO after Lee resigned on June 6.
Trump hasn't appointed anyone to head the copyright office yet, since he's too busy being awesome to do any actual presidenting, and he hasn't gotten a list of possible candidates from the Russian ambassador yet. But if his executive actions so far are any indication, you can bet there won't be any Obama-era "right to repair" left in the USPTO when he's done, since his entire raison d'être seems to be making sure to reverse anything done by the black guy before him. Even if only superficially.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've posted one post to https://www.ifixit.com/ and every month I get 30+ thanks for it (all one e-mail).
It was how to get an Acer Switcher (tablet attached to keyboard) to work. You take off the bottom and disconnect the connection to the battery, reconnect and good to go.
Trump will kill this, but only if someone tells him about it. It's not something that he cares about, and it hasn't been heavily politicized, so it is not likely for one of his aids to mention it.
If we stay quiet, he probably will not be aware of this happening until after the agency passes it's rules.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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"
Obama had the leader of Google into the White House about once a week through his entire 8 years. The Obama admin was completely in bed with Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc and Obama was elected and the re-elected using a mind-blowing tidal wave of corporate cash. Hillary tried to get elected using an even bigger pile of corporate cash than Trump.
Honesty Test:
Name just ONE high tech company that might be affected by this policy that gave more money to the Republicans and/or Trump than to Democrats and/or Obama/Hillary.
[crickets]
The line has been clearly drawn since the first caveman traded his rock for a sharpened stick.
"If you trade for MY sharpened stick, you can harden it at my big fire for free, for the life of your stick."
If you wanna bundle value added services on your sharpened stick, and trade for my two rocks instead of just my one, just remember, you don't control my stick anymore, it's MINE. If I can come up with a way to take advantage of your value added stick services for the 2 smaller sticks I made by "hacking" my stick, well, you should have thought out your value added plans a little more than you did.
You don't get to tell me what I can and cannot do with my stick(s) unless you give me back my rocks, and if I'm happier with my sticks than I was with my rocks? Tough shit for you. You also don't get to control what fire I choose to use to harden my sticks, or who can re-sharpen them. Even if I've used your fire a few times before.
If you slot your stick for just the perfect rock, I'm still allowed to put my own rock on the top, even if your rock is just the best rock out there for sticks. You don't have to sell me your rocks, but you absolutely do not get to dictate what rocks I choose to use.
Cavemen figured this shit out a long time ago.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
it's just not silicon valley.. it's all big companies.
that's the problem.
the car industry is a lot better legislated about this than the electronics industry though! like, you can get tools and docs to fix cars.
otoh, the only people who have apple diagnostic tools for current apple products are apple themselves and apple has a policy of NO REPAIR - if the diagnostic tool tells them that a single resistor needs to be changed, they will change the entire board and that will mean repairs that are worth more than the device for anything older than 2 years for apples products. it's planned that way.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Right to repair clearly does not include right to access services without paying. If there's no DRM, there's no way to enforce it. If there is, you can break DRM to fix it, but not to access unpaid service.
And no, a thing you built yourself is not "broken" just because it can't access a service for free. Not even the original that you shipped of theseused into not working intentionally.
Go back to the drawing board and read a lot more before being ignorant on the internet again.
Hey, if we're playing fantasy games, might as well imagine Jill Stein isn't a complete fucking loon.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
your tube radio is likely to have parts available that can be used and it likely has the schematic inside it to fix it.
now if a resistor on the charge circuit on your apple board goes bad you're much more screwed over since there is no schematic available and apple is actively trying all it can to hide what is broken with it and is trying to make it so that if it has an unauthorized fix it will brick itself. ..and also trying to make it illegal to break the encryption on the parts drm, to have a stranglehold on replacement parts(and guess what, they are not selling them! ). the official repair prices being so high anyways that it makes more sense to buy a new device instead.
and it does kinda matter when the same company denies warranty on the basis that you left a window open on a rainy day.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
More seriously, this is meaningless for any consumer electronics that depend on software without an unlockable bootloader. The major requirement that I'd love to see is that vendors must release a tool to unlock bootloaders and documentation for all hardware once they stop providing security updates. Any iPhone older than an iPhone 5 is now effectively useless - you can't safely use it connected to a network and you can't install a third-party OS on it. My partner has a Nokia Lumina 1020 from 2013, which still has pretty decent hardware in comparison to midrange modern phone (and a better camera than I've found on any other device), but it runs Windows Phone 8.1 and there's no way of installing anything else on it. In contrast, my cheap (first-gen) Moto G is happily getting software updates from LineageOS, long after the original vendor stopped caring about it.
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Aww, please tell me you really believe that. That's so adorable.
Nobody tell him Santa doesn't exist!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's one of the things you can't oppose and sell it to anyone in the population. No matter what your agenda, "right to repair" is something you would get behind, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum. If you're leaning right, you get jobs from China back to the USA, if you're leaning left, it's empowering people to escape the stranglehold of corporations.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nope, just being descriptive of a place that is so out of control that it it is now practically impossible to live there, due to out of control housing costs, and a number of other factors.
Allowing that situation to get that far out of control is damned silly. Silly Valley is an accurate description.
The biggest push for this is in the flyover states. Farmers are raising a major fuss over not being able to repair their own equipment. The software doesn't allow them to replace anything without the vendor showing up and telling the software it's all OK.
Unfortunately this is in the flyover states. Since they're not deep pockets and/or high profile they don't get the same level of attention. People don't think about farms - food comes from the grocery store.
As much as I hate lobbyists I hope they can hire some good ones to make the necessary deals to support the patent office in this odd outbreak of common sense.
now if a resistor on the charge circuit on your apple board goes bad you're much more screwed over since there is no schematic available and apple is actively trying all it can to hide what is broken with it and is trying to make it so that if it has an unauthorized fix it will brick itself.
Well fortunately, Android phones are all fixable, and have been since the first phone.
It is a question of what you want. And the solution is illustrated by my silly example of the Atwater Kent.
The Atwater Kent uses seriously large components, and if hard pressed, I can make a lot of them - there are even some intrepid makers who are producing vacuum tubes in their shops.
But there is a big catch in there. The Atwater Kent is pretty big. A large part of that is because of those big replaceable parts.
So if we are to make that iPhone or Android smartphone repairable, we're going to have to do something about the construction. Not all that many folks are equipped with SMT repair setups, and even though I have the microscope and super tiny soldering devices, the component size and density in a phone makes the job so daunting I would only attempt it if my life depended on it.
Next up is troubleshooting. If we are going to find and repair these things at the component level, it will take time. Which is charged out. We are decades into the concept of swapping out whole assemblies because it's less expensive than the repair process. So now we have one board in a phone and many other modern devices.
So with making the modern smartphone at best the size of the old bag phones, and the extremely limited number of people who are going to repair individual components at the SMT level, yeah, I'd just as soon get a new phone.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Your hands wouldn't be cold if it was a Note 7....
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Uummmmmmmm, last time I checked the "Government" IS the populace. So nothing happened to it. It's right there doing what it's supposed to do.
Hey there, old timer! That must have been a long, long time ago. Right now "the government" consists for 99% out of unelected bureaucrats and other government workers that, unionized or not, make way too much money and need way too many bodies to do their jobs. There are of course the exceptions, and with the sheer size of "the government" there are actually many, but exceptions exist to prove the existence of the rule. (The US Copyright Office is such an exception, that is why "the government" is trying to get it out of the Library of Congress' protection). This 99% of the government is a self-sustaining, self-justifying, self-vindicatory Blob that over the last 200 years grew and grew and grew. This 99% is funded directly by the taxpayer (or in other words: their checks come from "the government"). The 1% that is (re)elected needs considerable funding to do so, and the drive for self-preservation means they will do almost anything to keep this funding available to them. So ask yourself: where does this funding come from, and why is that funding being maintained? Are there that many benevolent patrons of the democratic (lowercase d) process? Or is there something to be gained, which otherwise would not have been? If it's all beneficial to the people that cast their votes... why the financial "incentives"?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Oh please, have you tried repairing a modern smartphone? A lot of things in them are quite repairable, if you can get it open. Opening my Galaxy S5 (and previous S4) was easy because the back popped right off, so getting to the internals was pretty simple with a jeweler's screwdriver and my fingernail. There's tons of repair parts available on Ebay for these phones for dirt-cheap prices. Did the USB jack get messed up? No problem, you can get a new board with that for a few dollars and pop it in. Camera go bad? That's more expensive, but still it's easily replaced. And of course the batteries on these phones are trivially replaced.
What we really need is a law banning consumer devices that are glued shut. You may have to replace an entire PCB in these devices, but with aftermarket parts available cheaply, that's really not that bad, and certainly beats replacing the entire device.
You can still require the OS to be signed, just provide a mechanism to sign it for a device that you own, once it's no longer receiving security updates. As part of the unlocking process, you install a new signing key generated for that user.
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