Massachusetts Senate Passes Resolution To Do In-Depth Study On Right-To-Repair (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On July 25, the Massachusetts Senate approved a Resolution that would create a special commission that would research the feasibility of forcing device manufacturers to treat customers and independent repair shops the same as officially licensed repair outlets. According to the proposed study, that means providing customers and independent repair shops with "repair technical updates, diagnostic software, service access passwords, updates and corrections to firmware, and related documentation." Gay Gordon Byrne, executive director of The Repair Organization, helped push the bill in 2012 and has been working to extend the law to tech companies ever since. "This is just one step in a series of steps that will end Repair Monopolies for technology products. I'm thrilled," Byrne told me in an email about the pending study.

The Resolution to create the study group still needs to pass the Massachusetts House, but the session ends July 31 so right-to-repair watch dogs won't have to wait long to see if it goes forward. The proposed makeup of the study commission shows that the legislature is serious about the issue and also reveals how big tech's repair monopoly is about much more than just being able to open up your iPhone without voiding the warranty. The legislature wants the study commission to include 23 members, including various members of the legislature but also a wealth of experts in various tech fields. They want someone from the Massachusetts Farm Bureau, a medical device manufacturer, an expert on electronic waste recycling, someone who repairs complex medical equipment, an intellectual property lawyer, a cyber security expert, a local farmer, and various other experts and citizens affected or knowledgeable about the right-to-repair.

Comments

Right to repair?

[DontBeAMoran]

Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a right to repair... if your devices are glued shut?

Re:Right to repair?

[Anonymous Coward]

glued shut *and* no replacement parts available other than chinese knockoffs that are never quite right.

a 'right to repair' law needs to go 'bigger'. not only should you have the right to repair your own stuff, but manufacturers need to make stuff that *can* be repaired, can be taken apart. can be put back together... AND have actual factory original or equivalent parts available.

ya know: design and build stuff to last, not just to last-until-the-warranty-expires. REDUCE is the first step of reduce-reuse-recycle. companies have forgotten that first, and very significant bit in the chase for bigger profits. replacing your phone every year isn't helping. having a phone that lasts 5+ years, than another 3 as someone else's refurbished used phone, would.

Re:Right to repair?

[another_twilight]

You list 4. but how is a military normally a 'free market' item? If you include it, what about other things like infrastructure and utilities? Surely they are better handled by some form of co-operative or government?

What about regulation of shared resources to avoid tragedy of the commons (so indirect involvement in markets via environmental protection for eg)?
And here I'm not just talking about things that cause direct health impact, but indirect problems like overgrazing common fields or destroying parkland.

If the latter, then why not legislation that seeks to limit the waste inherent in manufacture of unrepairable products.

The idealised free market doesn't work well for long term costs. We have cognitive biases that discount long term costs vs short term gains. This is an area where an individual, with multiple pressures for limited expenditure may choose a cheaper, non-repairable product because the cost to them is only going to be realised over a term that makes it hard to properly assess on a personal level, but which is distinct at a social or governmental level.

Better include cars

[Anonymous Coward]

Most modern cars store their configuration in encrypted CCF files - usually over the CANbus network in the engine management unit - and you have to buy a decryption key for hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars if you want to change anything.

e.g.: Want to replace the pathetic factory fitted halogen headlamps with HID or even laser-phosphorous headlamps? The new ones won't even turn on until you update the encrypted CCF to tell it what type of headlamp they are.

You ban those

[rsilvergun]

the study's the first step to that. They'll run numbers showing the cost to the taxpayer of devices that crap out on the user after a year or two and that can't be repaired by design. Once there's hard numbers it'll be harder for the companies to hide behind ambiguity like they do today.

Hardware based monopolies need to go also

[wierd_w]

Take for instance, hardware that is more than capable of running other things (take a nintendo switch for instance. Without the locked boot loader, it can run Linux just like any other tegra based system. Works great doing it too.) that is crippled by its retailer/OEM to only run a single ecosystem, designed to be locked down hard, where there is no viable alternative market space for software.

I am picking on Nintendo here, because of how they chose to combine hardware IDs with user IDs for their services. (Each console has a unique console certificate that is used to encrypt the eMMC module, preventing you from simply replacing it, even though it is modular-- for starters. This certificate is also used to ban the console if it is modified in any way nintendo does not like, even if those modifications are redacted/expunged.)

suppose for a moment that you purchase a second hand switch from say-- ebay, or a used item from Amazon. The console works perfectly fine, but has a banned certificate. (Or, it does not work properly, and has a bad eMMC module, which again, is modular.) You might have the right to repair the console, but you do not have access to the digital keys needed to replace or restore the eMMC's contents to factory defaults, and you do not have a means of compelling Nintendo to unban the console if they did so after doing the restoration.

These kinds of things are direct consequences of hardware based distribution control mechanisms, and are wholly incompatible with right to repair, and first sale doctrine type protections.

If the US government is going to start championing for consumer rights in the forms of right to repair type regulations, they are going to have to put a foot down on hardware based DRM mechanisms, which imply a fixed ecosystem for that hardware, and a sole point-of-authority on legitimate repair and return to service.

That means:

No locked boot loaders
No hardware unique certificates or identifiers
No hardware encrypted storage (software encrypted is fine)

Good luck getting companies like console makers to abide by those. They will tell you all about how those restrictions are absolutely required for their industry, and the like.

In short, the government has to either decide to shit or get off the pot on that. There is no compromise. Either those things are made illegal, and right to repair rules-- or right to repair dies, and locked hardware stays a thing.

Re:Hardware based monopolies need to go also

[wierd_w]

I should probably clarify--

Hardware unique identifiers that are used as a supply chain or service identification lockout.

A simple identity tag is not what is intended. A tag that gets automatically interrogated by a fixed and central authority for the purposes of denial of service/blacklisting-- that is what I mean.

A VIN number is fine, as long as the VIN number is not part of a centrally enforced denial of service/tamper detection system.

Should be called FSF Act

[Antique Geekmeister]

The idea that the client or purchaser of a product should have access to repair or to modify a product is the foundation of the Gnu Public License, the software licensing model published by the Free Software Foundation, whose business offices are in Massachusetts. It's also a state where the legislature mandated that government documents be in open formats That was around 2005, and led to profound political hardball, such as the creation of the mislabeled "Open Office XML" format, created by Microsoft by get past the new laws and which, functionally, Microsoft ignores to continue with proprietary and unstable document formats in its flagship "Office" products..

It will be fascinating to see this play out in a state with that kind of legislative history.