Saturday, June 11, 2022

New York Passes Nation's First Electronics Right-to-Repair Law





Repair just needs to become a design priority for everything.  Even if it has to be plug and play tech which is generally easy enough.  It does not matter so much with top of the line cell phones were trade out is good enough because of low prices from high volume manufacture.

That stops with all else.  There we need to be able to pull apart things and replace items, just like our washing machines.  This acts to push manufactur5ers in that direction and stops the nonsense of forced repairs.

The real elephat happens to be farm machine repair where we need to be able to charge down time back against the supliiers if they wish to insist on repair contracts.



New York Passes Nation's First Electronics Right-to-Repair Law

New York becomes the first state in the country to pass historic legislation that would make it easier to fix your things.

June 3, 2022, 10:56am

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gqj8/new-york-passes-nations-first-electronics-right-to-repair-law


After a multi-year battle, New York has become the first state in the country to pass an electronics right-to-repair law, a historic win for consumers and independent repair shops across the U.S., not just in New York. The move has the potential to seismically shift the power balance between consumers and electronics manufacturers.

The bill overwhelmingly passed the state senate on Wednesday by a vote of 59 to 4. It passed the Assembly Friday afternoon by a vote of 145-1. It will now go to Gov. Kathy Hochul for final passage. The bill is the most expansive consumer rights legislation to pass in the United States in recent memory and is the result of countless hours of grassroots campaigning from consumers and consumer rights groups.

The legislation, called the Digital Fair Repair Act, covers all consumer electronics and will require companies to sell repair parts and tools and to provide repair documentation to consumers under “fair and reasonable terms.” Companies like Apple and Samsung, as well as medical device providers, video game companies, and electronics trade organizations have spent years and thousands of dollars lobbying against this sort of legislation in New York and all over the country. Repair.org

The New York legislation was modeled on a similar law that applies to cars passed in Massachusetts in 2012. After that legislation was enacted, auto manufacturers signed a “memorandum of understanding” that essentially made the legislation a national policy, because car manufacturers didn’t want to have to deal with slightly different versions of the same law in different states. Right to repair advocates are hopeful that the same thing will happen with electronics; if repair parts and guides are available in New York, it’s impossible to keep those parts and guides from making their way to other states.

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