Right To Repair Legislation Is Officially Being Considered In Canada (vice.com)

Canada is the newest frontier in the fight for the "right to repair" after an Ontario politician introduced a bill on Thursday that would ensure individuals and independent professionals can repair brand-name computers and phones cheaply and easily. From a report: Manufacturers make it incredibly difficult to repair our broken devices ourselves. Instead of taking a smashed phone to a local repair professional for an affordable fix, a complex matrix of trade secrets and government intervention often means consumers have to make a pricey trip to the Genius Bar or buy a new device entirely. This is bad for your wallet, but also bad for the planet.

Ontario Liberal Party MPP Michael Coteau ran into this issue head-first after his daughter dropped his Samsung smartphone. An official repair job from the manufacturer was more expensive than just getting a new phone from his carrier, he told me over the phone. "It's a shame," Coteau said, "because the Samsung S8 was very good for me. Everything was perfect. I would've kept using it. But now I've replaced it." On Thursday, Coteau introduced a private member's bill in provincial parliament that, if passed, would be the first "right to repair" law for electronic devices in North America. More than a dozen US states are currently considering similar bills, but nothing is on the books yet in the US or in Canada.

Comments

Re:Let's try baby steps

[DickBreath]

The Samsung Galaxy S5 had:
* removable back, which covered a . . .
* replaceable battery
* SIM card
* SD card
* A headphone jack (how cowardly compared to Apple's "courage")

BUT . . .it was also WATERPROOF. There are YouTube videos of people taking their S5 phone swimming, shooting video underwater with it, and coming up to the surface. A video of someone washing their S5 in a front loading washer with the screen locked to the on position so you could see the well lit up phone during the entire washing.

Wow. A phone that was waterproof, with headphone jack and replaceable battery. Somehow we no longer have the technical capability to build that combination of features in a phone.

Private Members Bills Never Pass

[Bradmont]

In Canadian politics, private members bills (bills presented by an individual representative rather than the party in power) almost never get passed. This one is doubly unlikely as it was proposed by an MPP of an opposition party, under the majority government of a right-wing, pro-business, quasi-populist premier.

So, move along, nothing to see here. It's not going to happen.

Re:Private Members Bills Never Pass

[Mashiki]

That's not really true. Private members bills pass often enough in legislatures across Canada, the reason you don't think they do is because most often those private members bills are party-centric policy actions that the aligned party doesn't want to tie their name to for whatever reason. Keep that after ~15 years of the Liberal Party of Ontario being anti-business, pro-business killing regulations, pro-tax the hell out of everybody, and screw you peasants you'll like the $0.18kWh electricity rates, and FT jobs? You'll like your PT service industry jobs. There's a good reason why people elected a pro-business government that's quasi-populist, that believes that industry and FT jobs aren't evil.

But if you haven't really been paying attention to politics in Ontario, so far Ford and the conservatives have stuck pretty hard to their platform of helping people in Ontario. So the chances of this making into law are higher then average, but keep in mind that the bill itself will have to goto committee too. Ontario has a lot of things wrong with it, and I mean a lot. The liberals went out of their way to fuck up everything they could to pander to Toronto while screwing the rest of the province over.

And just a FYI for those that want to really get into the political corruption, money laundering and whatnot. You might have heard about the SNC-Laval corruption scandal currently running the federal Liberal Party of Canada hard. Well just go take a look at G.M. Butts, he's the same guy who was behind McGuinty(Ontario premier liberals) and Wynne's(same as McGuinty) political ideas. Enjoy the shitshow, because it gets more interesting when Canada was bared from all federal US infrastructure building, and a few days after that happened the Globe and Mail were the ones breaking the SNC-Laval scandal open.

Re:US and Canada only?

[mark-t]

Pot, meet kettle.

LG V20 Phone for a super fixable

[foxalopex]

I went through a huge mess to find a properly working LG V20 and from everything I've read it was one of the last and fastest fixable phones. It features a replacable battery, sim and microSD slots. It was held together by about 22 regular micro screws and nothing was permo glued causing Ifixit to jokingly say V stands for "Very Repairable". I hope it lasts a long time compared to the epic glued together phones of today.

Re:LG V20 Phone for a super fixable

[dunkelfalke]

Glue is not a big deal. Affordable replacement parts are.

Re:Let's try baby steps

[thereddaikon]

English must not be your first language. He was mocking Apple's self described "courage" when they removed the headphone jack from the iPhone.

Re:Cue the lobbiests

[dryeo]

It's a private bill by the opposition, doesn't matter what is in it, it isn't going anywhere in Ontario and everyone knows this.

Maybe a different approach?

[jbmartin6]

How about instead of "right to repair" they just make restrictive covenants on consumer goods like this unenforceable? Let's get rid of the 'you are just licensing it' crap altogether.

Right to Ownership is better

[Hillie]

This is the problem when governments start to get bigger than the "protect the citizens' rights" limit that they should be.

Government starts to introduce laws that cater to large corporations that say "We can prosecute you for repairing stuff yourself" that is a violation of trade.

Once I pay you over a thousand dollars for something I should be able to do with it as I wish. That is ownership.

All of this started with the DCMA and we all warned this would happen and of course we were all called paranoid.

Make a simple law that states that once a consumer buys a product from that company the company cannot in any way shape or form do anything that would impede the consumer's freedom over use of that product, and not limited to but including, and then put every single possible use case and then extend it infinitely.

Of course this is a problem because governments have hyperextended their reach into consumers' lives beyond hat they should be allowed to do.