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Why We Must Fight For the Right To Repair Our Electronics (ieee.org)
Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne explain via IEEE Spectrum how people in the United States can preserve their right to repair electronics, and why people must fight for the right in the first place. Here's an excerpt from their report: So how can people in the United States preserve their right to repair electronics? The answer is now apparent: through right-to-repair legislation enacted at the state level. Popular support on this issue has been clear since 2012, when 86 percent of the voters in Massachusetts endorsed a ballot initiative that would "[require] motor vehicle manufacturers to allow vehicle owners and independent repair facilities in Massachusetts to have access to the same vehicle diagnostic and repair information made available to the manufacturers' Massachusetts dealers and authorized repair facilities." Carmakers howled in protest, but after the law passed, they decided not to fight independent repair. Indeed, in January 2014 they entered into a national memorandum of understanding [PDF], voluntarily extending the terms of the Massachusetts law to the entire country. The commercial vehicle industry followed suit in October 2015. Now we need right-to-repair legislation for other kinds of equipment, too, particularly electronic equipment, which is the focus of "digital right to repair" initiatives in many states.
Similar to the Massachusetts legislation for automobiles, these digital-right-to-repair proposals would require manufacturers to provide access to service documentation, tools, firmware, and diagnostic programs. They also would require manufacturers to sell replacement parts to consumers and independent repair facilities at reasonable prices. The bills introduced this year in a dozen states have some variations. The ones in Kansas and Wyoming, for example, are limited to farm equipment. The one most likely to be adopted soon is in Massachusetts, which seeks to outlaw the monopoly on repair parts and information within the state. If it passes, electronics manufacturers will probably change their practices nationwide. Consumers would then have more choices when something breaks. The next time your smartphone screen cracks, your microwave oven gets busted, or your TV dies, you may be able to get it fixed quickly, affordably, and fairly. And you, not the manufacturer, would decide where your equipment is repaired: at home, with the manufacturer, or at a local repair shop that you trust.
Similar to the Massachusetts legislation for automobiles, these digital-right-to-repair proposals would require manufacturers to provide access to service documentation, tools, firmware, and diagnostic programs. They also would require manufacturers to sell replacement parts to consumers and independent repair facilities at reasonable prices. The bills introduced this year in a dozen states have some variations. The ones in Kansas and Wyoming, for example, are limited to farm equipment. The one most likely to be adopted soon is in Massachusetts, which seeks to outlaw the monopoly on repair parts and information within the state. If it passes, electronics manufacturers will probably change their practices nationwide. Consumers would then have more choices when something breaks. The next time your smartphone screen cracks, your microwave oven gets busted, or your TV dies, you may be able to get it fixed quickly, affordably, and fairly. And you, not the manufacturer, would decide where your equipment is repaired: at home, with the manufacturer, or at a local repair shop that you trust.
I bought it. Itâ(TM)s mine thatâ(TM)s the end of it. We shouldnâ(TM)t need new protections. How about 500 years of common law on property? Isnâ(TM)t that enough?
If more people have access to the right tools and parts, more people can offer the service of repairing, thus increasing competition, enabling people with the skills and knowledge to do so to open a business and earn a living.
Not allowing it would create monopolies that can dictate which and how many places offer the service, much like in a planned economy. That reeks of Communism!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have a 9 year old LCD TV that has failing capacitors in the power supply. It takes multiple tries to power on, where it turns itself off and on and shows weird things on the screen. I know exactly what the problem is and I spent a dollar or two and got the caps I need, although I don't want to actually do the work until after the World Series is over just in case I do something stupid and break it.
But I'm sure Samsung would much rather have me go out and spend $500 on a brand new 'smart' TV that I don't want.
>> Why We Must Fight For the Right To Repair Our Electronics
In my day, we fought, for the right, to Parrrrrrrrt A!
You took out the tubes, went to the Drug Store, and used their tester, then bought replacements?
If you did that before you smelled burning Bakelite or dielectric, chances are you got to watch the entire World Series. If you didn't have to work in the afternoon.
Once autonomous vehicles become the norm, liability and legislation will work to prohibit owning the vehicle, due to the fear that consumers won't maintain the vehicles properly (software or hardware), putting others at high risk on the road. Car ownership will become obsolete.
Electronics ownership is already becoming obsolete due to the general risk and liability of insecurity. Manufacturers won't offer more than 2-3 years to cover the hardware, and security updates usually stop by then as well. We already essentially lease smartphones these days, placating to some form of forced upgrade every other year due to anything from a lack of support to irreplaceable failing batteries that inevitably mandate replacement. Desktops were something you could actually turn a proverbial wrench on, but no one buys desktops anymore. Repairing portable electronics? Are you kidding me? Wafer-thin designs and sealed chassis aren't easy for anyone to try and work on these days. Often times, it's not even worth the effort.
SaaS models are consuming our digital lives. We don't own DVDs or CDs anymore; we perpetually rent the ability to stream content. Same goes for many larger software suites that you now pay a monthly fee to simply maintain a usage license.
It's not the Right to Repair we need to be fighting for. It's fighting to preserve the Right to Ownership and get the fuck away from everything in your life being consumed at the "bargain" rate of only $9.99 per month.
The problem with modern electronic devices is that the repair shop needs to make a substantial investment in equipment and training for the repair staff as well as documentation/parts approved/authorized by the device's manufacturer.
A $10 soldering iron and a tape of resistors from Radio Shack being wielded by a well meaning amateur (er "professional") ain't gonna cut it, like it did in the '60s, '70s and a good part of the '80s. I'm not being facetious - there were a lot of products (TVs, VCRs, Computers, Microwaves, non-mobile/cell phones) were this was a reasonable option. Right now, not so much.
With this legislation there is a great opportunity for somebody to develop a chain of localized repair shops - and, no, I don't consider "Geek Squad" to be a good start at this.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It has been illustrated countless times through the years given unchecked power companies behave in ways contrary to any form of common good. A free market can not exist without regulations.
10 years ago, the first iPhone was released. The release of the first Android was in 2008.
10 years ago, the majority of computer displays were CRTs.
10 years ago, Netflix was only sending out DVDs.
10 years ago, when "Meet the Robinsons" came out there were only 600 digital movie theatres in the world.
10 years ago, the cost of putting 5 tonnes into orbit was $150M, now it's less than half.
10 years ago, there were no mass-produced electric cars.
10 years ago, the first HIV retrovirus "cocktails" were being tested on human patients.
Personally, I would say the pace of technology is moving along at a pretty good clip and I would argue it's moving and changing the world at a rate that hasn't been seen since World War II.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
When I heard about farmers whose tractors (John Deere) stopped working because they repaired it with a non-OEM part and the tractors telematics shut down because it didn't recognize the new part (non-electronic part BTW). I knew a shit-storm was coming. Then when I saw how John Deere responded to the outcry I knew it would be a protracted battle to get companies to do the right thing.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
...that we even need a law to pass for something like this, but here we are.
People might not realize this, but repair shops will be there, doesn't matter if these laws pass or not. They have been playing very important roles for sometime now, like finding out design flaws, being a major part in class action lawsuits for problems that manufacturers fails to admit, and pointing out major issues that big brands keep trying to hide from consumers.
Then, of course - as pointed out in the article - serving as competition to the overly inflated offerings of extended repair and other forms of ripping clients off from manufacturers.
I fixed a couple of my own smartphones, a washer/dryer machine and a vacuum cleaner myself... official options, when they were even available, were all priced too high to justify the fix (being a better option to just buy a new one) for most of those. Then there are grievances of authorized/official repair places taking ridiculous ammounts of time to fix some of them. You end up a victim of the worst monopoly practices.
I just came to the realization that it was worth investing in tools and time to learn just a little bit of how these electronics work, it ends up saving a whole lot of money and time. It's also great to educate yourself better on how these things actually work.
For the LG washer dryer in particular I'd need to either somehow take it to the shop, probably needing to pay for transport and all the hassle that it means, pay for probably a month worth of dry cleaners if it even got fixed, and then pay for the service which would certainly be priced waaay over what it really cost.
All it took was buying the faulty part myself and install it pretty easily. Fixed in a week, and only because I had to wait for the part to arrive. Total time spent actually fixing it? An hour at most. It'd be far more work just to take the damn thing down 16 floors, let alone all the rest.
It's important for the law to pass though because it forces manufacturers to provide schematic and parts for it to be done. Right now, we have to rely on shady sources and grey market pieces.
And then there's the entire eWaste discussion. One piece of electronic that you fix instead of buying a new one is one less device that will end up in a warehouse somewhere to be shipped to some foreign country with no human rights with people living in the middle of trash and pollutants.
The single argument that I always see thrown around against the right to repair is always about intellectual property and whatnot. If you ever hear it, it's bullshit. Restricting access to schematics and parts are not enough to stop competition from stealing tech if they want to, because it's extremely easy these days to just disassemble and copy the design if anyone wants to. There's no secret sauce in consumer electronics these days anymore. In fact, most manufacturers uses very common parts that are often not even made by the main brand anymore... it needs to be done that way because of mass production.
The deterrent for stealing intellectual property has always been lawsuits for violation. Yes, electronics these days are way more complex than the time in the past when electronic makers even included schematics with the product out of the box, but even if complexity has increased, methods of production are more or less the same. Smartphones in particular uses a whole bunch of components that are not proprietary and freely available in the market, and the parts that are proprietary you won't be able to reproduce with simple schematics anyways.
So definitely agreed. Right to repair is ultimately better in several fronts for consumers in general, and it's also a way to prevent brands and manufacturers to stop exploiting costumers.
The fuses?
#DeleteFacebook
You won't be repairing this on your kitchen counter, unless the manufacturers change a LOT about their products.
It's not about access to parts and information. My HTC M7 would not come apart without damaging trim parts. These were available, but then I destroyed the screen trying to get it apart to dry it out. And putting it back together? Adhesives were the key part, and very, very difficult to reassemble. The M8, worse.
An iPhone X? Disassembly? Ha. It's glued up. Galaxy S8? Curved glass = virtually unrepairable. Not many high end phones can be repaired by you and me.
My Surface Pro 3 isn't coming apart easily, even for a simple SSD replacement.
The myth of repairability can be stamped out now for a variety of products. Mind you, for many, even BMWs, access to the computers is practical - I watched a guy mod an E36 and an E64 in an hour, with map changes, marrying radios, and resetting antitheft that would have cost $700+ at a dealer. All with a laptop and $35 dongles bought off eBay. If only my '98 Saab could have been handled so easily. Heck, the 04 Impala is impervious to BCM programming, needs the Tech II, blowing $300 for a box, and more and more every time you leap into a new generation of systems. I spent less on my Selectric tools.
Repairability is becoming a myth for entire types of products. replacing caps on a flat panel TV is possible, but desoldering surface mount chips? Those cute little parts in the power supply? Diagnostics would be a start, but even the best still leave you needing tools. No, we are losing the battle to technology that just cannot be fixed by amateurs.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In this video Louis Rossman explains some of the ways Apple uses to make their products hard to repair for NO good reason apart from their own profit. He tells of his colleagues (independent repair shops) having their posts deleted when all they were saying is that such and such CAN be in fact repaired. Apple will not repair most damages even if it involves the user losing his/her data, and even if they are perfectly repairable.
Moreover, Rossman explains how Apple uses dirty tricks to terminate the warranty even when the user did nothing unauthorized.
Just watch it and be angry. Be very fucking angry.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Volvo sells its DiCE and VIDA diagnostic suite to anyone who wants to buy it. There are no subscription charges unless you want to download new firmware for the car, in which case you can buy a 3-day subscription for cheap.
The VIDA software is free and the DiCE adapter is a few hundred bucks, and gives you complete manufacturer view of every on-board system in the car. You can modify a surprising number of parameters in the car, perform self-tests, diagnostics, and so on.
I don't know why all manufacturers don't do this.
There's a subtle distinction here that's often lost - I see it muddled together a few places in TFA and also in the comments -- between the right to repair a device and the right to demand (?) redesign of a device in a way that makes repair easier.
The former seems quite reasonable, and the auto manufacturers got it done so that dispels the feasibility complaints, even for technology-stuffed modern cars. But I don't see MA (or anyone else) going so far as to say that car manufacturers should be required ex-ante to change the way cars are designed, built and assembled.
For electronic devices, however, there seem like there are real engineering tradeoffs between repairability and legitimate design goals such as parts cost, assembly cost, weight and size. Replacing all the glue holding a tablet together with screws might improve repairability while adding $0.14 to the cost and a few grams to the weight. A removable battery might be the same cost but add 3mm to the thickness. In some cases, it might be heuristically worth it, but I struggle in vain for any intellectually sound way to make those things commensurable.
And as an engineer, I surely shudder in fear of someone with no domain expertise in a problem that I spent years solving second-guessing my tradeoffs. Especially since they have no accountability to produce a workable design that can be actually shipped on time. At the same time, I recognize that the engineers with domain expertise are hardly neutral deciders of what tradeoffs are legitimate and which design elements serve no purpose other than to impede repairs.
So there I have it -- I don't see a scientific way to judge whether it's worth it and my choices for who to ask is either someone impartial with no idea of the specifics or someone that knows but has no incentive to impartiality.
[ Actually, the latter is kind of a pervasive problem. You can have folks with a ton of experience, or you can have folks that are neutral with no preconceived biases. But you can rarely have the same person with both. ]
This is not about the right to repair our electronics. We already have the right to do whatever we want with stuff we own, including trashing it, burning it, running over it with a car, and - yes if you want to - fixing it or modifying it.
This is about the hypothetical "right" of manufacturers to mess around with and disable stuff they made after they've sold it to you. Because you're not using your equipment the way they want you to. Saying this is about our right to repair implies that manufacturers have this right to meddle with stuff they don't own, when they clearly don't.
Voice recognition has been around commercially for 20 years.
Not reliable consumer-grade voice recognition.
I remember voice recognition 20 years ago, and you had to train the application if it was intended to be general-purpose. If you wanted vaguely acceptable accuracy, the training could take hours. If you want to use it in a noisy environment, forget about accuracy entirely. The only good way to avoid these problems was to limit its dictionary to a specific domain/function.
Compare that to today: I can speak natural English sentences to Google or IVRs (the good ones, anyway), and they mostly work as expected. I can do this in just about any environment without pre-training the system. I could probably push them to make a mistake if I wanted to, but I can do the same thing with human beings too.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I want to live in a world where all electronic products are sold in bubble packs on hangers next to the cash register. You'd use them until they stop working, and then throw them away and buy a new one.
No, sorry, got that wrong, I *don't* want to live in that world.
I've never understood why this irony isn't more apparent to people -- that certain "boutique" electronics are every bit as consumable and non-repairable and throw-away as the cheap crap in plastic bubbles on the impulse buy rack. I was going to say "cheap foreign crap" but then I realized that a lot of it is made in the same place and perhaps the same factory as the "boutique" cra-- I mean products.
Personally, and for as long as I can hold out, I won't own a phone or laptop or tablet where I can't easily replace that top consumable, the number one part that wears out, the battery. This means I don't buy certain product lines at all. In other cases it means I can buy up to version X, but with X+1 they glued the thing closed, so it's no longer a consideration. (I mean, seriously -- would you buy a car where the hood was welded closed at the factory?) But I'm not the demographic they're selling to, as I tend to use a product until it stops working and I can't fix it, which breaks the 18 month latest-and-greatest product cycle that makes so much lovely money.
There will probably come a time when I can't find a damned phone anywhere that has a battery I can replace when it stops holding a charge. (To use just one example.) But until then, and for whatever effect it probably doesn't have, I will vote with wallet.
This goes for cars, too. And refrigerators. I'd rather own something a few years older that I can actually repair or get repaired.
I think it's Ghandi who said something like, what you do will make no difference. But it's very important that you do it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Has the idea of repairing software ever come up? Because that would be a whole other can of worms, but, considering the pervasiveness of software in almost every device, the ability to fix simple bugs (especially security bugs) would be good to have. But then you'd have to access the source code. But how many devices do we all have that are next to useless because we cannot update the software when the manufacturer is not willing to do so (for instance, phones that cannot be rooted..)..
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Another, related thing that we desperately need is to outlaw any attempts to "lock" or otherwise restrict what an end-user can do with their own device they have purchased. Such locks are only acceptable on devices being leased or that the end-user does not own outright. This goes beyond just mobile phone modifications, but all IoT devices—anything with on-board firmware, basically.
After that, the next step is to require manufacturers to release source code to all of their binary firmware packages. Sadly this goal is much farther off, but we still shouldn't loose sight of it.