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Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Hackers, farmers, and doctors unite! Support for Right to Repair laws slowly grows

In the US, manufacturers in everything from consumer technology to farming and agriculture have long constructed systems that limit where customers can go for repairs—remember the old "warranty void if broken" stickers found on game consoles or TVs? Today if you have a broken iPhone screen, for instance, Apple runs Genius Bars across the country where users must go for permitted fixes. Other companies parcel work out to a network of authorized vendors. Manufacturers generally argue these constraints are necessary to protect proprietary information that gives theirproduct a leg up in the overall marketplace.

Slowly but surely, though, consumers and third parties outside of vendor-sanctioned circles have been pushing to change this through so-called "right to repair" laws. These pieces of proposed legislation take different forms—19 states introduced some form of right to repair legislation in 2018, up from 12 in 2017—but generally they attempt to require companies, whether they are in the tech sector or not, to make their service manuals, diagnostic tools, and parts available to consumers and repair shops—not just select suppliers.

It's difficult to imagine a more convincing case for the notion that politics make strange bedfellows. Farmers, doctors, hospital administrators, hackers, and cellphone and tablet repair shops are aligned on one side of the right to repair argument, and opposite them are the biggest names in consumer technology, ag equipment and medical equipment. And given its prominence in the consumer technology repair space, IFixit.com has found itself at the forefront of the modern right to repair movement.

"The problem is that there are only two types of transaction in the United States: purchases and licenses," says Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of the Repair Association, a right to repair advocacy group partnering with iFixit to further the movement. "You don't own something if it's covered by an end-user license agreement. All you have is a right to use it according to the manufacturer's terms."

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