‘Right To Repair’ State Laws Continue To Surge, But Enforcement Remains Nonexistent

from the fix-your-own-shit dept

There’s still a massive effort afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

US PIRG tells the Guardian that this year alone, legislators have introduced more than 50 bills across 22 states, including a Florida bill that addresses wheelchairs, a motorcycle-oriented bill in Missouri, and a proposal in Ohio that would apply broad new consumer repair protections across everything from digital devices to aircraft and construction equipment.

In Iowa, state lawmakers passed a first draft of right-to-repair legislation in April that focuses heavily on agricultural equipment and tractors, a subject that has driven broad, bipartisan support:

“Farmers have been fixing their own equipment as long as they have been farming, and it’s essential to the sustainability of our farms that we be able to have that control over the equipment,” said Aaron Lehman, who is also president of the Iowa Farmers Union.”

And on the federal level, efforts remain slow but ongoing to pass the Repair Act, which states that “a motor vehicle manufacturer may not employ any technological barrier or specified legal barrier that impairs the ability of a motor vehicle owner” to “access vehicle-generated data.”

One strange trend I keep seeing however (and this is perpetuated in the Guardian piece): despite major progress on passing new legislative proposals, I’ve yet to see a single state enforce any aspect of a new right to repair law despite absolutely no shortage of corporate offenders. And in several of these states these laws are approaching four or five years of age.

So while the momentum the movement has built is impressive, it’s decidedly less impressive if the new laws passed are so full of loopholes as to be pointless (as we saw when New York’s right to repair law was watered down post-passage), or enforcement doesn’t result in any actual observable reform. At some point activism has to start hammering real-world enforcement of laws already on the books.

Filed Under: consumers, hardware, independent repair, right to repair, software, state law, tractors