Ohio Could Be The Latest State To Pass ‘Right To Repair’ Law, Showcasing Broad, Bipartisan Support
from the fix-your-own-shit dept
State laws attempting to make it cheaper and easier to repair your own technology continue to gain steam. With the recent introduction of a new “right to repair” law in Wisconsin, groups like U.S. PIRG note that all 50 U.S. states have now at least introduced such bills.
But so far only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon have actually passed laws. Ohio could be the latest, thanks to the support of “free market Republicans” (remember those?) who don’t like the idea of big companies monopolizing repair:
“Blessing is a Republican state senator representing Ohio’s 8th Senate district, which includes much of the area surrounding Cincinnati. In April, Blessing introduced a “right-to-repair” bill that grants consumers legal access to the parts, tools, and documents they need to fix a wide range of devices while banning restrictive practices like parts pairing. If Blessing’s bill succeeds, the Buckeye State will become the latest to enshrine the right to repair into law, after similar legislative victories in Colorado, Oregon, California, Minnesota, and New York.”
The passage of a right to repair reform in Ohio would be an ideological win for the movement given the state’s highly conservative bent. It illustrates once again that support for these reforms is hugely bipartisan. Often corporate policy guys find a way to generate partisan animus around issues (see: privacy, net neutrality), but so far they’ve yet to have that kind of success in “right to repair.”
In large part because a cornerstone of consumer annoyance at these practices have involved John Deere screwing over rural farmers with cumbersome restrictions that dramatically drive up the cost of servicing agricultural equipment.
The problem: while a lot is made of states passing right to repair laws, the press, public, and activists tend to ignore or downplay the fact that no state has actually enforced these laws yet. Most companies in most states are still just happily monopolizing repair with clunky DRM, “parts pairing,” consolidation of repair options, and making manuals and parts hard to get a hold of — with no penalties.
At some point, some of the amazing energy being put into passing these laws needs to be redirected to demanding states actually enforce them. Unfortunately during Trump’s second term, when states face unprecedented and costly legal fights on absolutely everything, I suspect that this sort of consumer protection will likely be the first to fall through the cracks among cash-strapped states without states being pressured on the daily to make it a priority.
Filed Under: activism, consumer protection, monopoly, repair, right to repair, state law
Comments on “Ohio Could Be The Latest State To Pass ‘Right To Repair’ Law, Showcasing Broad, Bipartisan Support”
RIGHT to repair
At some point I ask “when did a RIGHT that we all have to repair our purchased goods go away” and why do we need a movement to restore that right?
When younger I soldered, welded (not so well 😉 ground, cut, spliced, slapped, and beat the hell out of things so they’d work.
I always read EULAs and I don’t sign, “I agree”, or buy things that don’t let me own what I don’t own. That’s why I haven’t had a game console since the PS3.
Why don’t people just refuse to buy stuff they affirmatively agree to give up their rights to… and then expect corrupt politicians to fix it up in post?
Re:
The answer to both questions is “late-stage capitalism”.
Re:
People want the products, but not the bullshit that goes along with them. The number of people willing to go without on principle is much smaller than the number of people who would just rather not have the bullshit.
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Because then you don’t get to do a lot of stuff. Simple-as. A lot of people wanted a PS4/PS5/whatever more than they wanted to actually read the stuff they were signing. And the fact that so many products and services have come to make this a standard practice means that it’s almost invisible to a lot of people.
I agree that it would be NICE if a lot of people suddenly became better-informed of and interested in degrees of ownership, but clearly that hasn’t happened. At this point, the only way to fix that without a time machine is to stop letting corporations dropped a 20-page EULA on you any time you boot up a piece of software you already paid money for.
People being dumb, tired, or numb doesn’t excuse corpos from taking advantage of them.
Re: DMCA
Your right to repair largely was rescinded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Cory Doctorow spins many interesting summaries and consequences of this law, but in short it makes it illegal to circumvent digital locks. The US then made adopting similar or identical laws a prerequisite for signing trade deals. Of course Trump has no idea how anything works, but surly someone in his boot-licking herem has to realize how much the tech companies have to lose if other countries realize how vulnerable the grift of DMCA section 1201 is.
Here is link to one of the many articles Doctorow has written on the subject.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest
Re:
When copyright laws were passed, and when the courts refused to recognise that the First Amendment invalidated the authority for such. But nobody really noticed until, a couple centuries later, the concept of “repair” had become dependent on modifying copyrighted material; individual actions were no longer sufficient to figure out the modifications; and lawmakers had gotten away with banning speech describing such repairs.