Colorado Passes Its Third ‘Right To Repair’ Bill
from the fix-your-own-shit dept
Despite the best efforts of automakers and companies like Apple, states continue to push forward with popular “right to repair” reforms that make it easier and more affordable for consumers to repair tech they own.
While they vary in potency, New York, Oregon, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota have all now passed some flavor of right to repair reforms. Colorado just got done passing its third such bill. The first two ensured that consumers had access to the parts, tools, and documentation they needed to repair agricultural equipment and powered wheelchairs.
This latest bill broadens the state protections considerably, ensuring that consumers have the tools, parts, and manuals to be able to repair everything from blenders and refrigerators to laptops and cell phones to appliances and IT equipment. Unsurprisingly, right to repair activists are pretty happy about it:
“Everything breaks at some point and when it does, we should have the freedom to fix it,” said Danny Katz, CoPIRG executive director. “Right to Repair gives us options when our products fail. This bill empowers consumers, letting us choose when, where, and how we fix our products. And having options saves us time and money while reducing the amount of waste that we produce.”
Again, the quality of state right to repair legislation can vary greatly. Many state bills intentionally carve out many of the worst offenders when it comes to efforts to monopolize repair (game consoles, cell phones, medical equipment, agricultural gear, cars). New York state’s bill was watered down post-passage by Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul almost to the point of uselessness.
But while numerous companies (like Apple) keep trying to claim that these reforms pose significant new privacy or security threats to consumers, they’re not having much luck. While U.S. consumer protection is generally on the ropes, right to repair reform efforts aren’t slowing down, and continue to see widespread, bipartisan support from annoyed American consumers.
Filed Under: colorado, consumer protection, hardware, reform, repair, repair monopoly, right to repair, state law
Comments on “Colorado Passes Its Third ‘Right To Repair’ Bill”
A terrible day...
… for consumers who will now be most assuredly stalked by repairmen, gremlins, murderers and salesmen all because these repair shops will sell data to nefarious groups
Which is something [Brand] would never do. No sir. They value your privacy.
Apple always blames security and/or privacy any time they’re required to loosen the vice they have on their customers balls even a quarter turn. And the number of the rubes that fall for it and carry their water is shocking.
As much as I don’t want to use Google anymore, they are several orders of magnitude more open. So, maybe one day I can roll my own and avoid this vendor locking completely.
The reason they haven’t blocked right to repair bills is, they haven’t played to the lowest common denominator. They need to let people know that right to repair causes covid, requires vaccines, and steals elections.
there’s a very basic Legal issue being totally ignored here:
What legitimate Authority do state legislators actually have to interfere with/modify voluntary purchase contracts between private Buyers & Sellers of normal consumer goods & services ??
Centuries of Anglo-American law say NONE (as long as no fraud or coercion is involved in the transaction)
Caveat Emptor is still the basic Contract Law –ultimately it is Buyer’s responsibility to understand what the Seller is agreeing to … or not agreeing to in a sales transaction.
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“as long as no fraud or coercion is involved in the transaction”
Are you claiming there is no fraud committed by manufacturers with regard to maintenance of their product(s)?
LOL
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No, I correctly note that American politicians have no legitimate governmental ‘authority’ to impose their own arbitrary contract requirements upon normal 2-party private voluntary contracts.
FRAUD is an entirely separate legal issue. fully addressed in in long established legitimate Contract Law.
Consumers have ample legal remedies available against actual FRAUD by any SELLER, big or small.
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“Consumers have ample legal remedies available ”
Hahaha … are you here all week?
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Depends on the depth of the consumers’ pockets.
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There’s no contracts in the negotiated sense. There’s no negotiation with megacorps who bought all the competition, or who, by their very nature, collude with any remaining competitors to remove points of product and service differentiation which have any real meaning for customers. Further, many times “voluntary* isn’t part of the equation.
(Also fuck this ancient Anglo-Saxon shit for all it’s worth. It’d be a hoot if you were actually subject to that system of “justice”.)
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Centuries of Anglo-American law back the idea that when you buy something, you own it and can do whatever the heck you want with it.
Sure, you can argue that when you purchase (for example) an iPhone you aren’t actually purchasing it. You’re entering into a contract to possess an iPhone and use it in an Apple-approved manner. That’s certainly Apple’s position.
Given that Apple does everything it can to obscure the existence of this contract — and describes the act of giving them money for an iPhone as “buying” it — you could make a pretty good English common law argument that Apple’s contracts are fraudulent and void.
Anyhoo, this is all moot. It was certainly true over a century ago that Anglo-American law restricted government interference with contracts, but that ceased to be the case well before any of us were born.
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“negotiations” are an optional aspect of any contract — buyers & sellers often just accepot each others superficial terms.
if you buy a hamburger at McDonalds you are legally executing an unwritten, non-negotiated Sales Contract.
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“if you buy a hamburger at McDonalds you are legally executing an unwritten, non-negotiated Sales Contract.”
I am not a lawyer but … aren’t minor children allowed to purchase food products from fast food vendors, including Mc Donalds? I thought children could not enter into a contract. I saw it on TV or something.
Does it have to be a hamburger for it to be a contract? Do you want fries with that? Will have to alter the contract.
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“Do you want to exercise the meal option for this contract?”does have a certain rings to it.
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Do you really believe this statement, or are you just going to hyperbole and bullshit? And if do really believe this, how did you manage to avoid learning anything about legal system in the United States? Are you a SovCit? Were you raised in a cult and had no contact with the outside world?
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Why do you speak of “contracts” as if they’re some sacrosanct thing independent of governments, laws, and courts? Without these things, contracts would just be pieces of paper like any other. Without copyright law (and courts upholding secrecy clauses in employment contracts), what would be stopping us from copying and distributing the repair manuals, from reverse-engineering and repairing the software?
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Legislators have regulatory authority, genius.
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User-name appears legit…
In other news, congress is going to vote on this amendment to the FAA bill thursday which contains all the kill anonymity, mandate i.d, break encryption garbage they’ve been pushing since 2018
https://www.congress.gov/amendment/118th-congress/senate-amendment/1911/amendments-to-this-amendment?s=a&r=122
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Since 2018? You young whippersnappers, I tell ya.
I’m old enough to remember when the Clinton administration was pushing the “Clipper Chip” as an end run around encryption…
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Ironically, in retrospect, we’d have been better off with Clipper. Its “law-enforcement access” feature was broken from the get-go, such that any user could’ve disabled it and nobody could’ve notice till law enforcement tried to break it (see “Protocol Failure in the Escrowed Encryption Standard” by Blaze). It would’ve normalized encryption, and Bernstein still would’ve sued the government to get strong encryption—which probably would’ve been “dropped in” to replace the backdoored stuff within a decade. Whereas it’s been about 30 years and the phone companies can still tap all “phone calls” and text messages trivially.
Why has Colorado pass three “right to repair” bills anyway, instead of just passing one and then making amendments to the initial legislation to broaden its scope?
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Probably due to lobbying?
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I’m also curious as to why it needed to be replaced/amended twice already. What worked and what didn’t in the earlier versions? And are there significant changes yet visible in the new-product and product-repair markets (either in Colorado, or outside it but traceable to this law)?
Are there any big carveout industries left, in Colorado?
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“carveout industries”
MBAs playing three card monte?
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I love that game! Even though I somehow never win it…
We really need this at the federal level. People shouldn’t be arbitrarily locked out of being able to repair their own devices or take it to anyone other than their own lobotomized “partners” if you are even lucky enough that they offer one. And when they do it’s priced to be such that it’s made to be cheaper to just buy a new one.
The world needs less waste and especially less e-waste. There are products that are perfectly usable that are wasted.
With Microsoft’s draconian W11 requirements (that I have yet to see evidence that it provides the average non compromised user any benefit that makes the price of making millions of PCs e-waste worth it) more people need to be made aware of alternatives more than ever once w10(you know “The last windows release” according to MSFT a few years ago) goes EOL. Wish there could be a big push towards one common Linux distro with new drivers for more hardware for basic consumer level PC use that is kept up to date.