For example, my monitors appear to be hollow inside, so that a bit of dust got in and caused one of them to get a bad pixel. For so many years, smartphones weren't waterproof. Most of the power tools I own seem to use plastic for the most-used parts like the on/off trigger. Batteries can't be easily accessed or replaced. Etc etc etc.
If we were to count these design decisions as booleans in a measure of good engineering, then even one profit-seeking misstep could result in a 50% reduction in repair score. I feel that most products in existence would score perhaps 4/16 or 25%, maybe lower (edit: could be as low 15/65535 = 2.29e-4 depending on the weight of the bits!). Everything from cars where the alternator or fuel pump are buried under the engine, to smartphones that can't be easily opened or have their SIM card swapped, to appliances that don't have a low-voltage cutoff to survive a brownout.
So I wonder if this act touches on any of that. If not, it would be great to codify these things into standards, sort of like Consumer Reports but more formal, with the goal of promoting and eventually achieving decommodification.
Oh look, we once again have this absurd "game console" carveout. When someone can explain what makes game consoles different from any other computer, please let me know.
Nintendo has done a lot of litigation to claim that game console alterations (modding, but also by definition repairs) enables circumvention of their DRM.
Most computers don't try to lock out their owners from administrative access, but video game consoles usually do.
Which is b.s., but I guarantee that's why they got the exemption.
With the exemption of alarm systems (why?) what's stopping Apple from classifying their new models as an alarm system? After all, it has crash detection and can call 911 automatically.
Probably a "security" reason. If $anybody can get access to tools we use at the factory, bad guys can circumvent the alarm.
I'd imagine that it's pretty similar for game-consoles: literally _any_ tooling/docs that allow $hackers or $pirates to gain any foothold threatens our business model...
I don't think either of those are particularly _good_ arguments, but I'd bet that they're very similar to whatever lobbies were involved in crafting the legislation.
I imagine it has to do with integrity of the system. If people start messing with it and leave some sensors unplugged and there's an incident, the first thing survivors are going to do is sue the manufacturer despite having tampered with it.
I'm surprised to see airbags didn't make the list. Some things, amateurs really shouldn't mess with.
When I was younger, I worked at a company that made a burglar alarm (among other things). The UL test for alarm systems which have a fire alarm function was the hardest thing to test. It had to simulate "lighting hits nearby and the fire alarm still has to work" test. The 10KV spike on the power line was setting fire to the alarm units.
>I'm surprised to see airbags didn't make the list. Some things, amateurs really shouldn't mess with.
I don't think auto parts need right to repair, as far as I know companies like Dorman Products are allowed to reverse-engineer pretty much any part of a car, manufacture, market and sell them.
As a rare simultaneous right-to-repair and infosec advocate, it kills me that people think these must be opposite in nature. This is only true when you consider the user to be a threat vector. Big tech certainly does though, and there's a huge financial incentive to treat the user that way. Apple has also proven that the user-mistrust model works great for the company, and people will buy the products anyway. It's a sad state
I agree and will add that in my experience the companies that do put right-to-repair opposite infosec are almost always relying on security through obscurity which as we know is not security at all.
I would also love for you to bring to market a price competitive replacement screen that is somehow backdoored. I don't know why you think that would be profitable at all, but I welcome the price pressure.
If you are backdooring the hardware, then the idea would be that the data would be worth it to you. Seems like it would make it easier to compete on price, since the value dynamic is skewed
You think it would be profitable to source a spec similar screen, market it, backdoor it, exfiltrate in a detection evasive manner what started out as a 3.5MB wide data stream... and build out the infrastructure to receive hundreds of thousands of backchannel connections? Really?
Infosec advocates are super pro-R2R. You're confusing corporate lawyers who (falsely) claim their controls are necessary for security with being people with any actual knowledge of infosec.
Gavin Newsom is the king of fluffy feel good bills whilst insuring his favorite lobbyists and industry allies get their carved out exemptions. This dude has to be one of the slimiest politicians in the western world.
As currently structured (largely due to the voting system and campaign finance laws), being a politician is a constant struggle between pure ideals and practical accomplishment. There are short term and long term trade offs for both categories.
Hey! I noticed you in a comment about cold calling. I have been doing something similar (near 100 in the past month), and am at a dilemma regarding how to approach it. I am curious if you are still cold calling.
Apple will probably just price the individual parts high by claiming that their parts are of higher quality which will again deter customers to get their parts repaired.
Genuine question: (tad bit lazy too) so how will this law affect individual who have Apple products? - moving forward (after a certain date) I will be able buy and install a battery in phone /laptop. Upgrade the ram/hdd/ssd etc ? Or something different?
The bill linked in the article does very little to describe what has changed in regards to 'right to repair.' I'm wondering if they linked the wrong bill.
> Exemptions: game consoles, alarm systems, agricultural and forestry equipment
So basically, you have the right to repair things as long as it's not a John Deere, an Xbox, or an alarm system. Those things are magical in nature and we must not anger the gods of their making.
I can't take anyone seriously who defends these things. I don't need a devil's advocate for what it's worth; I've heard the arguments, and I'm about as convinced about them as I am the case for a flat Earth.
I feel like they had to exempt those ones to avoid the lobbyists. I think this is a good first step. First, it applies to all new industries that pop up. Also, I think it will be good to collect evidence that right to repair benefits consumers and the environment. That might provide the footing the state would need to fight for right for repair for those specific products
Agricultural product producers are one of the biggest offenders when it comes to "right to repair". There's no reason why farmers shouldn't be able to fix their own equipment. These companies make it so farmers can't fix their tractors, they have to go to a dealership. Farmers that, for over a hundred years, have been doing repairs on their own in the field (literally) to get their tractor working again so harvest finishes, still aren't allowed to fix their own equipment. It's not a "reasonable" exemption when there is decades of precedence. Adding a computer to these things should not stop someone from doing this work, and there's no reasonable explanation why someone shouldn't be able to repair something they've had the rights to repair for decades.
Agricultural equipment falls into industrial equipment which has different liability concerns for the manufacturer.
If you modify a Ford truck and that modification kills you, you're liable.
If you modify a John Deer tractor and John Deer didn't do everything in their power to stop you from making an unsafe modification, they're liable.
Furthermore, if a farm worker gets killed, maimed, injured from the framer's modification, the farmer is immune from liability and it is still John Deer that would be liable.
> Whether or not someone is eligible for workers’ compensation depends on their state and the industry they work in. There are no requirements at the federal level that mandate states to have workers’ compensation laws. Nevertheless, every state, except for Texas, requires most employers to carry workers’ compensation insurance. However, the majority of state workers’ compensation laws specifically exclude or limit agricultural employers from the workers’ compensation requirement.
Yep - that's where the legal fix needs to start. Until people making the changes are liable for the changes they make to industrial equipment (and this includes things like cranes and generators and such that also have similar issues of repair), the industrial equipment makers are going to be very hard to persuade to support right to repair as it puts them in the spot of even more liability.
Thanks for the link, but I still think there's enough nuance in the court system (in any country) to recognise that a manufacturer shouldn't always be held liable for a system just because their logo is on it. There's no law dictating that manufacturers have a duty to make farming equipment impervious to mechanics' failures, and unless there's a clear indication that courts will interpret some law this way, I wouldn't bet on it.
Even in this case, one of the lines of argument seems to have been that the manufacturer was aware of pre-existing safety issues and injuries, yet did not recall the product or adjust its design. That's certainly different than a one-off unauthorised modification blowing up.
I was only addressing the agricultural equipment part.
I suspect that the argument that gaming consoles made was that it is necessary for them to be able to restrict access to repair because failing to do so would make them unable to enforce intellectual property and copy protection on their equipment as required by licenses that they have from publishers.
"This game can only be played in Japan because of {content/licensing}". Enabling full repairs would mean that someone could more easily modify their device to present itself as a Japanese version and now the company and maker is liable for content that is allowed in Japan but illegal elsewhere.
Again, this is an "I suspect" - I don't know for sure what argument they're making - just trying to channel the mind of the corporate lawyers (which isn't an entirely pleasant way to be thinking).
> I feel like they had to exempt those ones to avoid the lobbyists
Lobbyists have no power over regulators except to threaten to withhold bribes from them. The only reason why a regulator would care about a lobbyist is if they're corrupt and receiving bribes - as in this case.
See also Medicare offering significantly more healthcare for old people, removing them from the pool of voters motivated to pass Medicare for all type legislation.
Lots of examples of “cracking” the voting population to stall political will.
I view it as a First Amendment issue. We can call out "privileges" that lobbyist groups have that ordinary citizens don't (which as far as I know are not granted by law, they just have to do with the size and influence of the groups). But a lobbyist is just a person or group that voices an opinion to law makers. In theory, literally any individual person can be a "lobbyist" and preventing the practice would prevent people from talking about issues to lawmakers. Which would be the exact opposite of what we would want in a democratic system.
Lobbyists aren't necessarily bad. They're _supposed_ to be there to educate those who make decisions. But they go far far beyond that and we need to regulate them massively.
The US was NEVER a democracy. It was founded as a “democratic republic”. And basically operates as a republic, in which the aristocrat class sneers in contempt at the “deplorables”, utterly convinced they are the only ones fit to make decisions and thus driven to a mad desperation to keep direct representation out:
Republicanism (supposedly) offers a solution to alleged instability, rashness, impetuosity, and social and political tyranny of democratic politics because it recognizes that the majority does not equal the whole of the community. US citizens elect what are basically proxies for power, but those proxies have only a facade of accountability. Instead, the elected enter a sphere where they ultimately control the institutions that control life for everyone in the US. It allows them to erect sets of rules that are never uniformly applied, it thrashes violently against efforts to combat such corruption, and have known for centuries that ultimately the voters are immaterial to the perpetuation of this system.
Absolutely no one in the US does any kind of governing whatsoever. The chickenshit house and senate AND executive branch punt lawmaking into the Supreme Court. Laws are all written by the Praetorian guard of lobbyists, piece of shit attorneys, and NGOs/think tanks. The judiciary exists to rubber stamp plutocrats’ agenda, nothing more. Binding arbitration ensures that the “deplorables” are forced into a parallel legal system, which robs them of the opportunity to take companies to court.
Hey now. As a liberal, I really don't like the way you're talking about the US government. They're the good guys and they are only corrupt when republicans are in control. What are you, some kind of racist nazi?
What is the substantial difference between an ethical lobbyist (that is, one who just hounds a law maker all the time, but does not engage in gift-giving, favor trading, political donations, etc) and a particularly engaged citizenry? The lobbyist takes a pay check?
Lobbying is the engagement with members of the government to promote a certain agenda. The reason the offices of our legislators are open to the public is so that the public can go in and do exactly that. It's called "lobbying" because it is what is done in the lobbies of state houses.
There is nothing wrong with lobbying as such, but the combination of campaign-donations-as-protected-speech-for-corporations with lobbying makes for a very powerful, legal flavor of corruption.
Lobbying is not a magical activity. The public servants whose salaries come from money you have no option but to give them should not be giving in to lobbyists.
>Exemptions: game consoles, alarm systems, agricultural and forestry equipment
I don't understand how people seem to think their food just appears out of thin air. Farming is a 24/7 job and is hard on equipment. Repairing farm equipment is at least 50% of the job. Games consoles, alarm systems, or trees don't feed anyone.
Maybe if farmers go on strike now of all times the fall which is harvest time and let the food rot. Let's see how long people can go without or with reduced availability of food. "Oh no my tractor broke down and I can't repair it"
I think if we've learned anything during corona it should be that there are different tiers of economic activity.
4) that what we absolutely need, 3) that what would be nice to have, 2) that what serves no purpose/we would be better of without and 1) that what we've failed to ban.
If we strictly define those we can then proceed to rate those who consume our attention and those tasked with governing by the ratio of time they spend on each.
No doubt we are all guilty pondering niceties rather than necessities. Imagine an idea for a startup that is necessary.
I agree. I'm honestly surprised by how much shit US farmers are willing to take from John Deere. Not to make this political, but you'd expect a group that largely votes Republican to be a bit more radical and unfair in fighting an unethical company.
They're probably tired, scared, and unorganized. John Deere's bullshit only makes them more scared and unorganized, and not less tired. I'm sure they're not taking this shit because they're ok with it, but farmers have to take a lot of shit from a lot of powerful organizations to get by.
Well, if/when they ever do fight back, they will immediately be labelled right wing nutjobs by the mainstream media and no one will care about who/what they're fighting against, and you'll see lots of "well, I usually support right to repair, but those trump hats were really scary and john deere's position is actually kind of reasonable" comments here.
Agreed. As much as I hate that John Deere escaped this one, we can regroup now and will have a getter position of bargaining since it's only "expanding" an existing law rather than creating a new one from scratch.
We can regroup? The people who write these laws have all the power already. They just have to write things down and if you don't do the things they get some of your company's money or occasionally can lock you in a box.
By "we" I mean those of us who have no direct power, but work to convince those with power to pass the laws. The legislature isn't going to do it without that
This is not at all accurate. From the bill introduction:
The bill would require... the manufacturer of an above-described electronic or appliance product... to make available, on fair and reasonable terms, to product owners, service and repair facilities, and service dealers, the means, as described, to effect the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of the product, as provided.
The bill would also require a service and repair facility or service dealer that is not an authorized repair provider, as defined, of a manufacturer to provide a written notice of that fact to any customer seeking repair...
The bill would also authorize a city, a county, a city and county, or the state to bring an action in superior court to impose civil penalties on a person or entity for violating the Right to Repair Act, as provided.
The bill would make these requirements and enforcement provisions operative on July 1, 2024.
Would love to be proven wrong though, could easily be missing something hidden in there. Both pages seem to be purely about requiring things of people though, not allowing things.
This law requires manufacturers to provide parts, tools and documentation for how to repair their products. It didn't change anything about rights of people to do whatever they want with their property.
I bet you haven't heard all the arguments. Here's one that came to mind when I read the actual text of the repair law as to why there might be two of those three exceptions.
For agricultural and forestry equipment there is already extensive California law dealing with them in the the California Business and Professional Code (BPC).
To wit, the "Fair Practices of Equipment Manufacturers, Distributors, Wholesalers, and Dealers Act" which is Chapter 28 of Division 8 ("Special Business Regulations") of the BPC.
Alarm systems are also regulated under the BPC.
This new "Right to Repair Act" is part of the Public Resources Code. It is is Division 30, Part 3, Chapter 8.6.
Division 30 is "Waste Management". Part 3 is "State Programs".
Chapter 8.6 was the "Cell Phone Recycling Act of 2004" so presumably is getting renumbered to 8.7, and the "Right to Repair Act" is being inserted right before that, after the "Rechargeable Battery Recycling Act of 2006" (Chapter 8.4) and a chapter called "Electronic Waste Recycling" (Chapter 8.5).
(Why is this done as waste management under the Public Resources Code rather than under whatever California's consumer protection code is called? I have no idea!)
It seems at least plausible that the exceptions other than the video game console exception are there because legislators feel that changes to how those things are handled should be done separately via changes to the BPC.
Lol, these exemptions are pretty hilarious. I can get the logic of regulations that prevent tampering with alarm systems for safety reasons, or potentially dangerous heavy machinery like that found in agricultural equipment. Carving them out of right to repair is super silly.
Still a net win for right to repair. On the game side, everyone is just going to play on a steam deck in the future anyway.
Sadly, agriculture is a large part of the "right to repair" movement and one of the groups that would benefit the most from it, as they've been repairing their own equipment for a long time and John Deere et al have been closing down as much as they can so people can't repair their own stuff.
And that's the group of people make it possible for us to stuff down all this food we're consuming, and somehow lawmakers find it OK to not give them more rights...
Oh yes, I definitely agree, and I support the rights of farmers to repair the equipment they use. The carve out for agricultural equipment is clearly a concession to John Deere lobbying.
John Deere sees value in IoT data gathered from its equipment to do all sorts of predictive analysis. That very much undercuts the basis of American food production, which relies on government subsidies for a variety of reasons. I ultimately believe that this value is derived by front running American farming subsidies, a complex form of insider trading. An existential crises is brewing in American farming that repairing tractors is on the forefront of.
However, fixing a combine harvester is definitely a different prospect to modifying your game console or cell phone. We can acknowledge that. I still think that farmers are capable of repairing and modifying the equipment they depend on to make a living and provide all of us with food. But there definitely needs to be some form of safety regulation.
So let me get this straight. I can now claim right to repair for all my cars, computer, phones, tvs, furnaces, smart meters, water heaters, smart bulbs, lamps, tablets, laptops, smart speakers, speakers in general, microwaves, gym equipment, and lawnmowers (not agricultural or forestry!). I call that a win. Sorry we didn't catch em all yet.
Exempting game consoles is funny, because it proves the question is "How much money can a company make from their products?"
Because we know that consoles are typically sold at a loss or barely break-even point, at least at launch (and some for their entire lifetime - like with Xbox[1]), with their cut of digital & physical sales funding the continued R&D of the consoles.
The only difference with iPhones is that Apple both makes money up-front on the hardware and on the backend with app/game sales.
If Apple were to cut the price of the iPhone, or fill it with diamonds (or an actually-valuable rare material like Tungsten) to bring the COGS up to the MSRP, would the EU and Cali suddenly bow to Apple and let them off the hook on being a gatekeeper/anti-R2R practices?
I think legistlators would make the case that while general purpose computing devices should have right to repair laws, game consoles are machines dedicated to frivolous entertainment and that consumers shouldn't mess with them. It's very silly, but I think it does present activists a schism to exploit. Apple believes that it's phones are a closed ecosystem that they have the sole right to distirbute software and, until recently, provide hardware repairs for. But legislators clearly understand that smart-phones serve an important societal function. Thus they should be subject to right to repair. They will come around eventually on electronic entertainment, There is tons of politcal pressure around farming equipment, and consumer alarm systems (think ring) are due for a whole heap of government regulation.
The alarm systems, I kind of understand, insofar as there are
1. security certifications depending on these being present and functioning, and nobody's going to certify equipment with arbitrary third-party repairs; and
2. these devices always work only with some kind of subscription paid to a security company anyway, since the point of them is to send some signal to said company to get something to happen.
The problem is that it's basically impossible to tell when an alarm system has been working all along, vs. failed and was then repaired by a third party — including flashing it with subtly different third-party firmware found online somewhere — and now is "working" again with no visible change to behavior (but where it'll now help you commit insurance fraud.)
As such, there's no way for the insurance companies to make such a forbidding rule, and have it be enforceable. There are no "inspectors" or "auditors" that can be sent to look at your alarm system who could possibly notice that it's been "repaired" in this manner.
Pretty much the only (industry-wide) thing that can be done to curb such repair attempts, is to outlaw the tools (like reverse-engineered third-party firmware) required to do so.
(Of course, any given alarm device maker could do what Apple has done with iPhones, and just make all major components of the devices proprietary, and have all components do signing handshakes before talking to each-other, where they reject each-other unless they've both been mutually first-party signed and activated. This would put high logistical barriers in the way of repairing the device — you'd have to get your hands on first-party parts, that the OEM won't sell you. But there's no system-level incentive that either the state or the insurance companies are in position to create, that would get them to do that.)
The best defense is: Politics is not a game of morals, virtues, or arguments, but a game of power, manipulation, and maneuvers. In that context, I think we can agree this is a win :) It'll be easier to override that clause down the line than it was to pass this bill.
No, we are not there yet, but we're part-way there. Some people just look for the negative aspect of everything rather than admit that a step might represent progress toward a goal.
If you are new to the third-world politics, I'll give you a 101: you "donate" enough cache to the ruling party - you get your business exempted from regulations, you don't - you get squashed. All you can see in this case is who paid and who didn't.
what if we take earth to be flat but "flat" in the sense of 'euclid-ness' like in a Manifold[1] ?
or maybe we gotta work on accepting that it may be possible for two completely different, even opposing theories, to explain similar things? (in completely different ways?)
it's just that one is easier (for some use cases) than the other one, and to fight over which is right is all wrong. I think that in the future the whole debate will be understood as an instance of the blind men and the elephant[2]
but we just don't have the mathematics (nor the philosophy...) for this. either it's not invented or it hasn't managed to become widespread
yes, that's right, I just tried to apologize for flat earth. your cue to downvote me away from sight. maybe I just want to make bridges... impossible bridges... between suckers lagging but still trying to understand and others who refuse or are unable to explain
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37507226