Contents:

• As The EU’s Right To Repair Law Takes Effect, Problems Remain

• Those Tiny Earpads Are Now a Five-Minute Fix, Not Headed To The Landfill

• EFF Podcast Explores Right To Repair

• Ghana Turns the West’s Denim Castoffs Into Couture

• GM Draws a Hard Line: “Genuine” Parts Only!”

• The Subscription Economy Is Coming for Your Stuff—That’s Bad For Repair

• As The Repair Workforce Crisis Grows, This Group Is Fighting Back

😠 Got A Repair Complaint? Tell Us About It!

As The EU’s Right To Repair Law Takes Effect, Problems Remain

July 31st marks the official start of the European Union’s right to repair. And yet, EU residents who assume they now have a legal right to fix the many devices they own and try to exercise that right may be unpleasantly surprised: there are big gaps in the EU’s landmark bill, and many EU nations have yet to enact a version of it to extend the right to their citizens.

In a post celebrating the go live date of the European Right to Repair Directive, Right to Repair Europe (repair.eu), the EU’s Right to Repair Directive said July 31st marks a major milestone for repair advocates - the product of years of campaigning. “For the first time, manufacturers of certain products will have to make repair a more realistic option by offering repairs beyond the legal guarantee period, limiting software barriers that block independent repair, and providing spare parts at reasonable prices,” the group wrote. “It’s a meaningful shift away from the throwaway economy—and proof that sustained advocacy can move policymakers.”

Dishwashers? Yes! Coffee Makers? No! Vacuum Cleaners? Maybe…

But there’s a catch... Right to Repair Europe notes that the Directive, as written, only covers a limited and somewhat arbitrary cluster of consumer products, leaving many everyday devices outside the law’s protections.

Covered products include washing machines and dryers, dishwashers, refrigerators, mobile phones, cordless phones and tablets as well as e-bikes and e-scooters batteries (starting in February 2027).

As for vacuum cleaners? It’s unclear. As Repair.eu explains, uncertainties in the language of the bill and the EU’s established ecodesign laws make it unlikely that the repairability requirements extend to this common consumer device. And other common consumer products - hair dryers, sewing machines, coffee makers and more - are clearly excluded from coverage.

Right to Repair Europe created a table showing the extent of coverage for a range of devices, as well as the kinds of repairs possible under the existing Directive’s language.

The Directive also includes vague language around what counts as a “reasonable” spare parts price and exceptions that could still allow manufacturers to justify anti-repair practices, Right To Repair Europe warned.

EU Members Slow To Adopt Repair Laws

Then there’s the issue of EU member nations. As of the go-live date, only four EU Member States have formally notified the European Commission that they have completed transposition of the Directive -Croatia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Finland. Others have published draft legislation or are moving towards enacting laws, but the majority are well behind schedule.

As this article at Sporting Goods Intelligence Europe notes, a German version of the right-to-repair law set to take effect this year leaves open the thorny question of what a “fair price” actually looks like.

The law, which transposes the European Union’s repair directive into German national policy, doesn’t provide clear guidance on what “reasonable” means, creating a likely point of conflict between manufacturers and consumers over whether a repair cost is genuine or just a strategic nudge toward getting the consumer to buy a new device.

As Right to Repair Europe points out, that people across Europe are likely to experience different levels of protection to their right to repair depending on where they live until all Member States have fully implemented the new rules.

In other words, Europe has taken an important first step, but not yet delivered a universal right to repair. The next phase is expanding repair rights to more products, closing loopholes, and ensuring repair is genuinely affordable and accessible for everyone.

Read more over at Right to Repair Europe.

Got a repair complaint? 😠 Tell us about it!

Do you have a complaint about a manufacturer who is blocking your effort to repair your product? The Repair Coalition wants to hear about it! Use the link below to talk about the repair obstacles you’ve encountered.

Repair Complaint

Other News…

Those Tiny Earpads Are Now a Five-Minute Fix, Not Headed To The Landfill

A year into iFixit’s expanded partnership with Logitech, repair guides for the company’s mice, keyboards, and headsets racked up more than five million views while spare-parts sales grew ninefold, according to a report by iFixit.

The numbers put hard data behind a simple idea: people want to keep their gear working, and given the tools, they’ll follow through. iFixit points out that small peripherals rarely get the attention lavished on phones and laptops, yet the EPA’s last national estimate found a staggering 74.4 million keyboards and mice trashed each year — many for problems as trivial as worn mouse feet or a flaking ear cushion. As the article notes, “a mouse with worn feet does not necessitate buying a whole new mouse,” and guides for the G Pro X ear pads or MX Master 3S now turn daunting repairs into doable, step-by-step tasks.

This kind of collaborative work echoes the slow-but-real progress Fight to Repair has tracked elsewhere, from EU battery rules pushing replaceable batteries into Kindles and the Switch 2. The real challenge, iFixit says, isn’t just writing the guide — it’s making sure the right part is available, affordable, and stocked so that fixing feels easier than shopping for a replacement.

Read more at iFixit.

EFF Podcast Explores Right To Repair

For more than a decade, those of us in the right to repair movement have been battling efforts by corporations to make it harder for you to repair the devices and products you already own. The reason is simple: if companies can use software locks and other means to force you to pay them whatever they demand - or to replace a functional product with something new, the costs to consumers, the economy and the environment are severe. Hundreds of tons of perfectly repairable items end up sent to landfills, while corporations and Big Tech flex their control over you and your property.

But how did the right to repair movement happen? What have we accomplished and where is it heading? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)’s Corynne McSherry and Hayley Tsukayama recently sat down with Adam Savage and Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, to dive into the origins of the movement and how manufacturers lock you out of the stuff you own, how the Right to Repair movement is fighting back, and what you can do to take back control of your devices. Check it out!

Ghana Turns the West’s Denim Castoffs Into Couture

A growing circular economy in Ghana is transforming mountains of discarded secondhand jeans into premium fashion, offering a homegrown answer to the textile waste flooding the country from wealthier nations, according to a report by Textile Today.

For years, Ghana has been on the receiving end of the West’s fast-fashion hangover, with Accra’s Kantamanto Market—one of the largest secondhand clothing hubs on the planet—drowning in bales of used garments, a sizable share of which arrive damaged or unsellable and end up as waste. Now, local designers and entrepreneurs are flipping that script, reclaiming discarded denim and remaking it into upcycled, high-value pieces that keep textiles out of landfills and dumping grounds while building skilled jobs and creative industries at home. It’s a story that echoes the broader themes we cover at Fight to Repair: rather than treating products as disposable, communities are reclaiming ownership over what already exists—extending the life of materials instead of tossing them.

The article argues that Ghana’s circular denim movement offers a scalable model for tackling global textile waste, but its success ultimately depends on wealthier nations rethinking the “throwaway” culture that created the crisis in the first place.

Read more at Textile Today.

GM Draws a Hard Line: “Genuine” Parts Only!”

General Motors has revised its collision repair position statements to add bold, red “strictly prohibits” language forbidding the use of salvage, recycled, aftermarket, and non-GM reconditioned parts across a growing list of repair categories, according to a report by Repairer Driven News.

The automaker has been steadily hardening its stance in recent months, and the latest round adds “strictly prohibits” to statements covering aftermarket parts, ADAS radars and cameras, bumper fascias, windshield glass, and supplemental restraint systems. Where GM once used softer phrasing like “not recommended” or “not approved,” it now flatly bars anything other than GM Genuine Parts—framing many of these components as safety features whose performance “must be restored to pre-loss condition using GM-approved repair and calibration procedures.” As Fight to Repair has covered with manufacturers across industries, this kind of tightening is part of a broader push by companies to route owners and independent shops back into official, and often pricier, channels.

GM justifies the crackdown on safety grounds, but critics of these tightening rules argue they squeeze out independent repairers, inflate repair bills, and lock car owners further into the manufacturer’s ecosystem—raising familiar questions about who really controls a vehicle after it’s sold.

Read more at Repairer Driven News.

The Subscription Economy Is Coming for Your Stuff—And That Could Be Trouble for Repair

The global Product-as-a-Service market is projected to balloon to $216.99 billion by 2035, growing at a rate that signals a fundamental shift in how consumers access everything from appliances to industrial equipment, according to a report by SNS Insider via Yahoo Finance.

The report frames the “product-as-a-service” (PaaS) model—where you subscribe to or lease goods rather than own them outright—as a booming market driven by companies eager for recurring revenue and consumers drawn to lower upfront costs and convenience. Proponents tout the environmental upside, arguing that when manufacturers retain ownership, they’re incentivized to build durable products they can maintain and refurbish. But as we’ve explored in previous coverage at Fight to Repair, this “access over ownership” trend carries a hidden cost: when you don’t own the product, you don’t control it, and repair rights can vanish entirely into the fine print of a service agreement.

As PaaS scales into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar reality, advocates warn that the promise of sustainable, manufacturer-maintained goods must be paired with real repair and ownership protections—otherwise consumers risk trading their stuff for a lifetime of dependence.

Read more at Yahoo Finance

As The Repair Workforce Crisis Grows, This Group Is Fighting Back

TechForce Foundation is ahead of its 2026 fundraising goal and on track to award $6 million in scholarships by year-end, but can still only fund one in six students applying to train as skilled technicians, according to a report by Repairer Driven News.

The nonprofit has raised $8.4 million toward an $11.6 million budget and reviewed nearly 9,000 applications from students in “deep financial need,” yet demand keeps outpacing dollars — mid-year applications jumped 43.2% while awards grew just 32.4%. “We tell kids they can be anything they want in life, and then throw them to the wind to figure it out,” said CEO Jennifer Maher, whose foundation launched a new Wraparound Resource Center in May to tackle barriers like transportation, financial pressure, and the leap from school into the workforce. The stakes are steep: TechForce estimates the U.S. economy is short roughly 140,000 skilled technicians a year, with 73,354 new collision repair entrants needed by 2029 — a shortfall that hits directly at the labor backbone of any right-to-repair economy.

With nominations for its 8th Annual Techs Rock Awards open through Aug. 3, TechForce argues the fix isn’t retention but recruitment — and that spotlighting the people who keep cars, planes, and hospitals running is essential to closing the widening gap.

Read more at Repairer Driven News.

Contents

• More Headstones In The E-Waste Graveyard: The Epidemic Of Software Abandonment

• Harley Davidson Riders Hit a Wall—And It’s Not on the Highway

• Vizio’s New Smart TV Can Go Dumb. That’s a Good Thing

• OpenPrinter Aims to End ‘Caviar Printer Ink’

• RAMageddon: How Your Old Computer Just Became Your Best Friend

• NYC Repair Shop Pushes Back on Apple’s “Replace Don’t Repair”

• The Wearables Loophole: How Your Smartwatch Dodged Europe’s Repair Revolution

• Circular Steel? Buildings That Refuse to Become Trash

• Dutch Researchers Score Funding to Rethink How We Make—and Remake—Things

Got a repair complaint? 😠 Tell us about it!

More Headstones In The E-Waste Graveyard: The Epidemic Of Software Abandonment

Every year, more perfectly good technology dies—not because it breaks, but because the companies that made it decide it’s time to move on.

This week, U.S. PIRG updated its Electronic Waste Graveyard, an online database documenting products rendered obsolete by software shutdowns, expired security support, or disconnected cloud services. The Graveyard was first unveiled in early 2025. The 2026 update paints a worrying picture: the graveyard is growing, with more phones, laptops, printers, smart home devices, and other electronics joining the list of products abandoned long before their hardware wears out.

Among the newly interned devices are 13 Amazon Kindle models, which died in May of this year after Amazon cut off store access for older Kindle models released between 2007 and 2012 — devices that, in many cases, are still being used daily by their original owners more than a decade later. The Kindle e-readers still turn on, still display books already downloaded, and still hold a charge. What they can no longer do is buy or download anything new, effectively ending their useful life as e-readers for many owners.

An even bigger source of gravestones: Microsoft, whose decision to end support for its Windows 10 operating system, while blocking upgrades to Windows 11 for many devices resulted in up to 1.6 billion pounds of electronic waste. (Note: Microsoft recently announced it would extend software support for Windows 10 until October 13th of this year.)

The costs to the environment are staggering. PIRG estimates that 1.7 billion pounds of potential e-waste now catalogued in the Electronic Waste Graveyard — an order of magnitude larger than the group’s original estimate. That growth is driven overwhelmingly by the end of Windows 10.

The update arrives as advocates across the country continue making the case that this isn’t simply an environmental issue—it’s a consumer rights issue. In New Jersey, PIRG used the Graveyard to spotlight products headed for the trash while calling on lawmakers to pass a Right to Repair law that would make parts, tools, and repair information available to consumers and independent repair shops. The campaign argues that owners shouldn’t lose the use of otherwise functional devices simply because manufacturers end software support or make repair impossible.

The Electronic Waste Graveyard isn’t really about dead gadgets. It’s about the choices manufacturers make after the sale. Every new headstone represents a product that could have kept working if companies had continued supporting it, released the software needed to keep it alive, or simply allowed independent repair communities to step in.

The technology isn’t always obsolete. Too often, the business model is what decides its fate. And advocates are looking to strengthen the rights of consumers when it comes to such actions. Software “End of Life Disclosure” laws proposed in three states, New York, Massachusetts and California, would require manufacturers to disclose the intended software support period to consumers prior to purchasing a product, and for ISPs and other companies that lease smart devices to consumers to replace unsupported, “end of life” equipment at no cost to their customers.

Stay tuned for more coverage of the “abandonware” epidemic!

Got a repair complaint? 😠 Tell us about it!

Do you have a complaint about a manufacturer who is blocking your effort to repair your product? The Repair Coalition wants to hear about it! Use the link below to talk about the repair obstacles you’ve encountered.

Repair Complaint

Harley Davidson Riders Hit a Wall—And It’s Not on the Highway

Wisconsin motorcyclists are increasingly unable to find independent shops willing to repair bikes older than 10 years, thanks to manufacturers using a decades-old copyright law to lock mechanics out of essential diagnostic software, according to a report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Steve Panten, Legislative Committee Chair for ABATE of Wisconsin, argues that manufacturers have “twisted a 1998 copyright law”—specifically Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—to make bypassing digital locks illegal, even when the repair itself is perfectly lawful. The result is a monopoly that forces riders “back to the dealership, on their timeline and at their price,” a familiar refrain for the farmers, car owners, and wheelchair users who’ve watched the same digital lock playbook run across the entire economy. Panten notes that groups like ABATE and the Motorcycle Riders Foundation are pushing reform at both state and federal levels, and even calls on Wisconsin’s own Rep. Derrick Van Orden—a daily Harley commuter—to champion DMCA reform.

Panten insists targeted updates to Section 1201 would restore access to diagnostic tools without weakening intellectual property protections or requiring new spending, arguing that “when you buy something, you should own it.”

Read more at… Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Vizio’s New Smart TV Can Go Dumb. That’s a Good Thing.

For years, TV makers have treated “smart” features as non-negotiable—bundling advertising, data collection, and mandatory online accounts into products that used to simply display a picture. Ironically, Vizio may have just stumbled into the best argument against that model.

The Verge found that Vizio’s new budget Mini LED Quantum TV delivers surprisingly solid picture quality for under $400. But the real story isn’t the Mini LED panel or HDR performance—it’s the setup process. Skip the account sign-in, decline the connected features, and the TV becomes something increasingly rare: a high-quality display that doesn’t constantly phone home or bombard you with ads.

That’s especially notable because Vizio’s parent company, Walmart, bought the brand largely for its advertising and viewer data business. The company wants connected TVs collecting information. Instead, privacy-conscious buyers have discovered an accidental escape hatch that turns the set into a “dumb TV” with modern hardware.

The Mini LED Quantum is a reminder that consumers don’t necessarily want more software—they want more control. Whether it’s repair restrictions, cloud dependence, or forced surveillance, manufacturers keep treating ownership as conditional. Sometimes the best feature isn’t a new AI assistant or streaming platform. It’s the ability to say “no” and still use the product you bought.

Read more at… The Verge

OpenPrinter Aims to End ‘Caviar Printer Ink’

OpenTools has revealed a prototype for Openprinter, a compact, durable, and fully repairable printer built on an open-source design that promises easy ink refills, and it’s now gearing up for a crowdfunding push, according to a report by notebookcheck.net.

For decades, printers have been the poster child of everything broken about modern consumer electronics: wildly overpriced ink powered by cheap printer hardware designed to support DRM-locked cartridges and firmware updates coded to reject third-party refills. The result: printer ink - which sells on the open market for between $85 and $250 a gallon - is among the most expensive liquid products on earth, selling for between $1,600 and $12,000 per gallon when purchased in the form of branded inkjet cartridges.

But Openprinter aims to flip that script entirely with a machine that users can actually crack open, fix, and refill without begging permission from a manufacturer. As advocates have long argued in coverage at fighttorepair.substack.com, the printer industry’s business model has thrived on planned obsolescence and locked ecosystems, making an open-source, repair-friendly alternative feel genuinely overdue.

In a statement released on June 29th, OpenPrinter members published a short video of the printer at work and said that they are “working tirelessly on the finishing touches before we launch our Crowd Supply campaign at some point in the next few months.” That includes work to optimize the printer’s ink drying system, refining the printhead/cartridge nozzle cleaning cycles, and streamlining the paper insertion process, while boosting print speeds. The group is also looking to enable mass manufacturing of their device. If the crowdfunding campaign succeeds, Openprinter could offer a rare proof of concept that repairable, transparent hardware isn’t just a wishlist item but a shippable product.

Read more at… notebookcheck.net

RAMageddon: How Your Old Computer Just Became Your Best Friend

Skyrocketing RAM prices driven by AI data center demand are making new computers wildly expensive, turning repairability and component swapping into essential survival skills for consumers, according to a report by iFixit.

Memory manufacturers like Micron have abandoned the consumer market to chase enormous profits from AI-hungry data centers, shifting production from standard DDR5 to the HBM memory used in LLMs—a move that has quadrupled Micron’s revenue while pushing prices toward another projected 50% jump each quarter through year’s end. The fallout is brutal: Apple raised prices roughly 20% across its entire lineup, even hiking refurbished models, while Microsoft quietly extended Windows 10 support and suddenly decided 8GB of RAM is “fine” for Windows 11 after years of pushing 16GB. As iFixit notes, the irony is thick—the same AI features companies are cramming into machines are the reason those machines are now unaffordable, echoing themes from Fight to Repair’s coverage of forced obsolescence and the circular economy’s dependence on repairability.

The article urges consumers to seek out machines with user-swappable RAM and storage—like LPCAMM2 modules—so they can buy minimal specs now, cannibalize parts from old devices, and upgrade later when prices finally fall.

Read more at… iFixit

NYC Repair Shop Pushes Back on Apple’s “Replace Don’t Repair”

A New York City repair shop is challenging Apple’s default logic-board swap for the 2023 MacBook Pro 16-inch (M3 Max), offering micro-soldering repairs that cut costs by 60% compared to the Genius Bar, according to a post on X by New York Computer Help.

When a logic board fails, Apple’s typical fix is to replace the entire board—an expensive, wasteful approach that often costs owners hundreds of dollars for what may be a single faulty component. New York Computer Help’s Midtown team says it uses microsoldering to repair the board itself, saving customers roughly 60% while keeping perfectly good hardware out of the landfill. The shop’s rallying cry—”Fix it, don’t replace it”—echoes a broader movement that Fight to Repair has covered extensively, where independent technicians push back against manufacturer repair monopolies that treat costly swaps as the only option.

The takeaway is simple but powerful: before accepting a full-board replacement quote, consumers should seek out skilled independent repair shops that can fix what manufacturers would rather replace.

Read more on… New York Computer Help’s X

The Wearables Loophole: How Your Smartwatch Dodged Europe’s Repair Revolution

A wave of new EU repair regulations designed to force manufacturers to make batteries user-replaceable has quietly exempted an entire category of popular gadgets—including the Apple Watch, Fitbit Air, and Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses—according to a report by notebookcheck.net.

The EU’s updated rules were meant to end the era of sealed, glued-in batteries that render devices disposable once their power cells wear out, but wearables have slipped through a carve-out that lets makers keep building products users can’t easily open or fix. The exemption means that when the battery inside your smartwatch or smart glasses inevitably degrades, replacement rather than repair remains the default path—a dynamic that echoes the broader battles over sealed devices and planned obsolescence covered previously at Fight to Repair. For a device category growing as fast as wearables, the loophole could mean mountains of e-waste from products designed to be tossed rather than tended.

Advocates warn that unless regulators close these gaps, the promise of Europe’s repair revolution will keep leaving the fastest-growing gadgets behind.

Read more at… notebookcheck.net

Circular Steel? Buildings That Refuse to Become Trash

Architects and engineers are increasingly turning to circular steel design—structures built to be disassembled, reused, and reborn rather than demolished into landfill—as a blueprint for a post-waste future in construction, according to a report by Mjengo Hub.

The piece explores how “circular steel design” flips the traditional build-use-demolish model on its head, treating buildings as material banks whose steel components can be unbolted and redeployed instead of scrapped. By favoring modular connections, bolted joints over welds, and careful material tracking, designers extend steel’s life across multiple building generations, cutting the enormous carbon and energy costs tied to producing virgin steel. It’s a shift that echoes the same reduce-reuse ethos driving the right-to-repair movement, where the goal is keeping resources in circulation rather than defaulting to disposal.

The article argues that embracing circular steel isn’t just an aesthetic or engineering choice but a necessary step toward a construction industry that designs waste out from the very beginning.

Read more at… Mjengo Hub

Dutch Researchers Score Funding to Rethink How We Make—and Remake—Things

A team of Dutch researchers has secured a major NWO grant to investigate more sustainable approaches to manufacturing and material use, according to a report by Mirage News.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) grant will fund work exploring how “making” can become more circular and less wasteful, tackling one of the thornier problems of our throwaway economy: how products are designed, built, and eventually discarded. The research aligns with a growing movement to keep materials in use longer through repair, reuse, and thoughtful design—themes that echo the broader push for a “right to repair” and reduced electronic waste covered at fighttorepair.substack.com. By centering sustainability at the earliest stages of production, the project aims to shift the conversation from cleaning up waste after the fact to preventing it from the start.

The grant signals that sustainable making is moving from a niche concern to a funded research priority, offering hope that the next generation of products may be designed with longevity and repairability in mind.

Read more at… Mirage News

Under the terms of the agreement, Deere must provide farmers and independent repair shops with the same repair resources—including critical software capabilities—that it provides to its authorized dealers for the next 10 years on “fair and reasonable terms.”

The deal with the FTC was announced amidst an effort by Deere to settle a class action suit filed by farmers and followed a years-long effort by farmers and consumer advocates to enforce federal anti-trust laws that prevent coercive- and anti-competitive practices that raise costs.

But is the FTC’s settlement with Deere the big a win for farmers that has been promoted? Maybe. Maybe not. Repair advocates are pleased by many of the requirements of the agreement, but warn that language could be (ab)used by Deere to limit farmers’ access to the information and tools needed to diagnose problems with Deere’s pricey agricultural equipment and complete repairs.

And then there’s the question of scope. Settlement or not, the fight continues to win a legal right for farmers and workers to repair all kinds of heavy equipment - green, yellow, red or otherwise.

The Devil is in Deere’s Details

To help unpack the details of the agreement, we invited Willie Cade of The Repair Association to join us this Sunday (July 12) at 1:00 PM ET (10:00 AM PT). Willie and F2R editor Paul Roberts will unpack the FTC’s agreement with Deere, as well as developments in the civil class action suit against Deere filed by a large group of farmers. Willie and Paul wil talk about concerns some have raised about loose language that could empower Deere to delay or even ignore provisions in the agreement. And they’ll discuss what comes next in the growing agricultural right to repair movement which is moving forward at both the state- and federal level.

How to join our live video stream

There are multiple ways to take part in the live video event.

• If you are a F2R subscriber, you’ll receive a Substack push notification or email when we go live. (You can use the button below to subscribe.)

• The live video will also automatically be inserted in your reading queue on the Substack app and you can join the stream from there.

• You can join our live video from the Fight to Repair publication.

We look forward to seeing you on Sunday!

If a machine threw an error code, needed a software reset, or required certain electronic repairs, many John Deere owners found themselves waiting for an authorized dealer, even when they had the skills and tools to do the job themselves. During planting and harvest season, those delays weren’t just frustrating. They could cost thousands of dollars.

This week, that changed in a big way.

The Federal Trade Commission, joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, announced a settlement with Deere & Company that dramatically expands farmers’ ability to repair their own equipment.

Under the terms of the agreement, Deere must provide farmers and independent repair shops with the same repair resources—including critical software capabilities—that it provides to its authorized dealers for the next 10 years on “fair and reasonable terms.”

That includes giving farmers access to technical manuals, troubleshooting solutions and other information. It also provides farmers with access to the tools that allow them to read, clear and reset electronic fault codes; re-program electronic components (including “pairing” newly installed electronic parts with equipment); restart machines after emissions-related shutdowns (aka “limp mode”) and so on.

Future repair resources needed for repairs must also be made available to farmers once Deere makes them available to over 50 percent of its authorized dealer network in the United States, the agreement states.

Addressing concerns farmers have articulated about “retribution” from Deere authorized dealers, the agreement requires the latter to promote the availability of the repair resources and support their use. Dealers and authorized repair providers are also forbidden from discriminating- or retaliating against farmers or independent repair providers who purchase or use such resources rather than dealer repair services.

Deere is also subject to strict reporting and oversight requirements to ensure its compliance with the stipulated order. The term of the order is 10 years and may be extended if Deere violates its terms. Compliance with the agreement will be overseen by the FTC and state attorneys general.

“Today’s settlement enables farmers to do what they’ve done for generations—fix their own tractors and other farm equipment—without having to pay an authorized John Deere dealer to do it for them,” said FTC Bureau of Competition Director Daniel Guarnera in a statement released by the FTC.

“The settlement with Deere will help lower costs for American farmers. The FTC will continue fighting against anticompetitive restrictions on American consumers’ right to repair.” - Daniel Guarnera, Director, FTC Bureau of Competition

The agreement means access to tools for reading and clearing fault codes, pairing replacement electronic components, restarting machines after emissions-related shutdowns, and accessing the technical documentation needed to diagnose and complete repairs. Just as importantly, Deere is prohibited from retaliating against farmers or independent repair providers who choose to use these tools instead of dealership service.

A deal years in the making

This settlement didn’t happen overnight. It follows years of pressure from farmers, repair advocates, state lawmakers, and the FTC, which sued Deere in 2025 alleging the company had unlawfully monopolized repair services by withholding the software and diagnostics necessary to fix modern farm equipment. The agency argued that those restrictions increased costs, delayed repairs, and harmed competition.

That suit was filed in response to a complaint against John Deere filed by U.S. PIRG, farmers’ unions, advocacy groups and right to repair advocates in 2022.

In a statement Wednesday, PIRG Right to Repair Campaign Director Nathan Proctor celebrated the decision.

“We should be able to fix our own stuff. This settlement from the FTC gives farmers more and better options to repair their equipment. It is a win for farmers and all of us who want a more fixable world,” Proctor said

“When farmers can’t access the proprietary software tools or critical information that are required to diagnose or complete repairs, it means they have to wait for an authorized technician before they can finish their work. The weather doesn’t wait on a dealership’s schedule — a delay could mean the loss of your harvest. Deere has now agreed to make available all materials needed to conduct repairs, including some which it has previously withheld.

“I want to thank the FTC for its work on this case. Our goal from the start of our campaign was to ensure that farmers and independent mechanics get everything they need to fix equipment. We will continue to monitor the situation and advocate to ensure that goal is a reality.”

Repair advocates caution that, while the agreement looks robust, more time is needed to review the language of the agreement. Also, restrictive repair monopolies are not exclusive to John Deere, but other manufacturers are not named in the FTC settlement.

“This is clearly a huge win for farmers and for us as advocates. But the fight isn’t over as Deere is only one OEM and there are no laws making access to repair information and tools a requirement,” Gay Gordon-Byrne, Executive Director of The Repair Association, told Fight to Repair News.

“Farmers have been asking for our help since we filed our first bill in 2014,” Gordon-Byrne said. “It took the combined weight to a class action lawsuit, multiple state attorneys general, and a concerted effort by the FTC, and possibly a near miss by legislators in Iowa to make it happen.”

“We at the Repair Association will continue to push for state laws until there is a federal law making the positive requirement of all OEMS to support legal repair for all products.” —Gay Gordon-Byrne, Executive Director of The Repair Association

Repair advocates note that the FTC’s settlement contrasts with the tepid language of a proposed private settlement between farmers and Deere.

As we reported earlier this week, that agreement - which has garnered an objection from one farmer named in the suit - does not clearly grant farmers and independent repair providers the same access to repair tools as authorized dealers.

“The agreement between Deere and the FTC is much better than the deal secured in (the) class action lawsuit,” PIRG’s Proctor said in a statement. “For example, it protects independent mechanics from anti-competitive practices in the repair marketplace.”

Should the proposed military right to repair provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) also get enacted it would amount to a “perfect storm,” Gordon-Byrne said, by adding a right to repair heavy equipment like bullozers and building equipment to agricultural equipment.

Previously, only one state - Colorado- had enacted a legal right to repair agricultural equipment. However, there has been little action by that state’s Attorney General to enforce that bill since it was signed into law in 2023. One theory is that Colorado farmers feared retribution by John Deere dealers should they request access to the information granted to them under the state law.

Stay tuned…

For longtime Fight to Repair readers, this announcement feels especially significant.

Back in 2022, we covered academic research arguing that Deere’s repair restrictions may have crossed the line from frustrating to potentially anticompetitive. Since then, we’ve watched the right-to-repair movement notch legislative victories, expose anti-consumer repair practices across industries, and steadily build momentum. Whether it was Epson programming printers to stop working, Apple activation locks sending perfectly functional Macs to recyclers, or Tesla quoting $16,000 for repairs an independent shop completed for $700, the pattern has remained remarkably consistent: control repair, control the customer.

The Deere settlement won’t end the fight. It applies to one manufacturer, and implementation will matter just as much as the agreement itself. Farmers and independent repair providers will be watching closely to see whether access is delivered in practice—not just on paper.

Still, it’s hard to overstate the significance of a federal settlement requiring one of the world’s largest equipment manufacturers to open its repair ecosystem. That’s a milestone the right-to-repair movement has been working toward for years.

Fight to Repair News will continue following this story as the settlement is implemented and its real-world impact becomes clear. Stay tuned.

Wilson Farms Land and Cattle Co., a named plaintiff in the federal antitrust lawsuit against John Deere, filed a sweeping objection in the U.S. District Court for the Norther District of Illinois on June 29th asking the court to reject the proposed settlement.

In the filing, Jared Wilson, the owner of Wilson Farms, argues that the proposed settlement asks farmers to give up some of their strongest legal claims against Deere in exchange for modest checks and repair reforms that, in practice, change very little.

Pennies for farmers, millions for lawyers

While the total amount of the settlement is $99 million, Wilson Farms and other critics note that this amount is a tiny fraction of the costs farmers have paid to support Deere’s repair monopoly in the last decade. Deere reported net income of over $5 billion in 2025. The $99 million settlement represents between 4% and 14% of the overcharge damages attached to repair labor that was estimated to be recoverable in the suit.

Doing the math, that means a class action settlement that actually addressed the estimated costs for farmers would range from $700 million to $2.5 billion in payments by Deere to U.S. farmers harmed by its anticompetitive practices.

And $99 million isn’t even the number farmers stand to benefit from. According to the objection, after attorneys’ fees (more than $40 million) and administrative costs, farmers could receive between $48 million and $79 million in actual compensation.

Given the more than 200,000 U.S. farmers covered by the class action and the methodology used to calculate payouts, it means the average recovery is estimated at $0.51 to $0.84 per acre. With an average farm of approximately 470 acres, that translates to $240 to $395 per claimant, the objection argues.

“A check for that amount would likely fail to cover the cost of a single authorized dealer service call made necessary by Deere’s monopolization of the repair services market,” Wilson wrote.

Agricultural repair advocates seconded that. Willie Cade of Graceful Solutions and a board member at Repair.org, the Repair Association, is the grandson of a Deere board member He has been compiling data on the actual costs to farmers of Deere’s repair monopoly. Cade cited the typical example of a 1,200-acre row-crop operation that paid its John Deere dealer $613,346 over the 8-year period covered by the class action suit. That comes to about $511 per acre.

The settlement returns roughly 79¢ per acre to that farmer for those same years, a gap of about 647-to-1 between what was paid and what is repaid, Cade wrote.

With lawyers reaping tens of millions in legal payments while the farmers injured by Deere’s monopolization of the repair services market walk away with just a few hundred dollars, Wilson Farms argues that imbalance should make the court pause before approving the deal.

“The actual settlement agreement is probably going to cost less for John Deere than what litigating this at trial would cost,” Wilson told Fight to Repair in an interview last week.

The objection filed by Wilson Farms also raises questions about the actions of the law firm representing the farmers (aka “Class Counsel”), Minnesota-based Gustafson Gluek, which he claims bent to Deere’s preferences at the expense of farmers in order see their efforts compensated.

Gustafson Gluek did not respond to multiple requests by Fight to Repair for comment on

Signing off on Deere’s repair monopoly

The heart of Wilson Farms’ objection is that the settlement leaves Deere’s restrictive and anti-competitive repair ecosystem largely intact. Under the terms of the settlement, farmers still wouldn’t receive guaranteed access to the software, diagnostic tools, and repair capabilities they’ve been fighting for. Instead, the proposed injunction contains broad carve-outs, weak enforcement provisions, and enough discretion that Deere could continue deciding who gets access to critical repair resources—and who doesn’t.

Even worse, Wilson Farms argues, under the terms of the agreement, Deere can continue using many of the same tactics that allegedly created the monopoly in the first place: limiting parts availability, increasing repair costs, delaying service, imposing new fees, or otherwise making independent repair more difficult.

If that’s true, then the settlement doesn’t dismantle the repair monopoly. It simply manages it.

Deere exempted from future class actions over repair restrictions

The Wilson Farms objection also points out something that should concern every equipment owner—not just farmers: Many of the real-world harms caused by repair restrictions aren’t fully compensated at all. Delayed harvests? Crop losses? Equipment downtime? Higher parts prices? Expensive software licenses? Lost productivity? These are the things that keep farmers awake at night, yet Wilson Farms argues those damages receive little or no meaningful compensation under the proposed agreement.

In fact, if the settlement is approved, Deere will receive broad legal protection from future class-action litigation over many of the repair restrictions at the center of this case. Farmers, meanwhile, would remain dependent on Deere’s repair ecosystem while giving up one of their most powerful tools for forcing broader reform: the ability to collectively challenge those restrictions in court.

That’s a big concession by farmers.

“ If we allow this to be the standard, it’s not going to break this monopoly. It’s going to enhance it, and it’s gonna provide (Deere) a lot of cover at the state houses when we’re debating right to repair legislation,” Wilson told Fight to Repair News. “They’re gonna argue that this has been solved and…you shouldn’t step into this.”

Wilson: Class Counsel shut me out

Wilson said he first learned of a potential settlement negotiations via an email on October 3, 2025, when Class Counsel sought his input on a list of injunctive terms they planned to use as their initial position in settlement negotiations.

In the objection, Wilson said he responded with detailed concerns about the terms of the settlement, explaining that they would provide little relief to the Class. After that, “Class Counsel became adversarial toward Mr. Wilson,” the objection claims.

Copies of a long series of emails between Wilson and Gustafson Gluek (Exhibit C) between October, 2025 and April, 2026 show Wilson explaining to the Class Counsel how the injunctive terms of the settlement would not serve the needs of farmers in the class action suit.

In the emails, Wilson repeatedly argues that any settlement must produce true parity for owners and independent repair professionals with John Deere dealerships and authorized repair providers. However, as written, the settlement merely expands access to Deere-controlled tools, allowing the company to continue controlling the repair apparatus needed to service equipment after settlement.

An effective settlement would ensure that repair tools do not remain under Deere’s control and that dealership-level functionality is available to farmers and independent repair professionals.

Wilson also repeatedly asks for the firm to allow him to meet and discuss the agreement with the other farmers listed as class representatives before allowing the settlement to go forward. However, no such meeting ever took place, Wilson said.

“If you review our correspondence, it clearly shows you have been stonewalling me from speaking with them-preventing us from doing our job for the class,” Wilson wrote in an email dated April 9, 2026.

In their responses to him, Gustafson Gluek attorneys Dennis Stewart and Daniel Hedlund explain that antitrust law limits what relief is realistically obtainable while the proposed settlement represents the best practical outcome considering the litigation risk.

The final version of the settlement shared with Wilson Farms in early March, 2026, “reflected the very same deficiencies Mr. Wilson had warned Class Counsel about.” And, on April 1, the Class Counsel notified Mr. Wilson that they would imminently file a motion seeking preliminary approval of the Settlement Agreement and removed Wilson Farms as a Class Representative for the purposes of the Settlement Agreement via a footnote in its preliminary-approval brief.

Focus turns to judge in deciding what’s right

Under federal law (Rule 23), courts must approve class action lawsuit settlements Settlement: The court must approve any settlement, dismissal, or compromise of a class action suit to ensure it is fair, reasonable, and adequate for all class members.

 Wilson Farms filing asks the court to reject final approval, closely scrutinize the broad release of claims, consider additional concerns about the adequacy of class representation, and allow Wilson Farms to fully participate in the fairness hearing before any final decision is made.

Whether the court ultimately agrees remains to be seen. A Fairness Hearing scheduled for October 29, 2026, in Rockford, Illinois, will take up the proposed settlement and the objections. There is an opt-out deadline for farmers of September 14th.

Stay tuned for more coverage of the Deere antitrust suit.

Contents:

• In Memo, Trump endorses automotive right to repair

• How the auto REPAIR Act got quietly gutted

• Report: Shoppers want to buy used, borrow and repair. Are retailers listening?

• Germany declares volunteer repairers “professionals,” but obstacles to repair persist.

• Meet PineVoice: the smart home speaker that doesn’t spy on you

• Surprise! (Not) Meta adds paywall to AI smart glasses

Like what you see? Subscribe to Fight to Repair News!

In Memo, Trump Endorses Right to Repair Cars

President Trump on Monday signed a memorandum endorsing Americans’ right to repair their own vehicles, including emissions control systems, according to a report by The Drive.

In the memo, the President urges the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clarify legal vehicle emissions repairs, “lowering the cost of living by promoting the freedom to fix.” Citing regulatory uncertainty in the language of the Clean Air Act (CAA) about whether aftermarket parts may be used in repairs due to the CAA’s prohibition on tampering with emissions controls, the memorandum asks the EPA to issue clearer consumer guidance and to deprioritize enforcement against “anyone who, in good faith, attempts to fix his or her own vehicle to its original configuration.”

The memo is the latest right-to-repair signal from the Trump Administration. In a recent meeting with executives from Ford, GM, and other auto industry leaders, President Trump publicly questioned efforts to limit vehicle repairs by owners and independent shops. Automakers “want a bill that prohibits people from fixing” their own vehicles, Ford Authority reported.

It lands as independent auto mechanics are calling out the restrictions on access to vehicle data imposed by automakers that make it harder to repair vehicles.

The memo also marks a sharp pivot from years of aggressive Clean Air Act enforcement and is part of a larger Trump Administration effort to loosen federal environmental controls. The big unanswered question is how the EPA will define “good faith,” and whether that loosening protects everyday repairs or quietly opens the door to gutting emissions equipment altogether.

The memorandum could put pressure on automakers who have lobbied against federal- and state auto right to repair legislation such as the REPAIR Act, which that seeks to give long restricted independent mechanics and DIY owners access to diagnostic tools, software, documentation and parts. As we’ve covered in past posts at fighttorepair.substack.com, the fight to fix cars—and everything else—has become a defining battleground over who really owns the products we buy, especially as vehicles grow more dependent on proprietary software.

While a presidential memo carries weight as a statement of intent, advocates will be watching closely to see whether it translates into enforceable rules that actually pry open automakers’ tightly guarded repair ecosystems.

Read more at The Drive and CBT News.

How the REPAIR Act Got Quietly Gutted by Automakers

A federal right-to-repair bill that started with bipartisan support and consumer-friendly promises was substantially rewritten in committee to favor automakers, leaving car owners and independent mechanics with weaker protections.

Originally pitched as a much-needed update for auto repair in an age of software-laden, internet-connected vehicles, the REPAIR Act took its inspiration from state-level auto right to repair laws in Massachusetts and (more recently) Maine, with language that prevented carmakers from using digital rights management and software to force repair work into franchised dealer networks. In its original form, the law guaranteed that owners and local shops could access the parts, tools, and data needed to fix cars.

But as Transport Evolved reported, after the bill’s high-profile bipartisan rollout, it was “heavily revised” before clearing committee, emerging as a measure that “moved away from helping car owners and independent shops.” The result, the outlet noted, gives automakers stronger safeguards while leaving consumers with fewer meaningful rights—and less power to enforce the ones they keep. It’s a familiar pattern for anyone following the repair fight, where promising bills get watered down behind closed doors.

Advocates say the watered-down bill proves right-to-repair has gone mainstream, and the push will continue through stronger federal proposals, state legislation, and pressure from consumers and small businesses who refuse to let the issue die.

Currently, residents of only two states in the U.S. have a legal right to repair their automobile (Massachusetts and Maine), as Newsweek pointed out. While 10 states have passed different versions of right to repair laws, all of the passed laws have a “carve out” for automobiles among other devices.

Read more at Transport Evolved

Shoppers Want to Buy Used, Borrow, and Repair—Are Retailers Listening?

New research from Mastercard reveals that consumer demand for circular retail models—like resale, rental, and repair—is creating significant new growth opportunities for businesses willing to adapt, according to a report by Green Retail World.

The Mastercard study, The Next Era of Conscious Consumption, highlights a shift in shopping habits, with more consumers actively seeking out secondhand goods, rental options, and repair services rather than defaulting to buying new.

This appetite for circularity isn’t just about saving money—it reflects growing environmental awareness and a desire to reduce waste, signaling that retailers who lean into these models stand to capture meaningful market share.

“As people stay focused on cost, they are finding ways to get more value out of what they buy — whether through resale, rental or repair — and those options are becoming easier to access,” said Michelle Meyer, the Chief Economist at the MasterCard Economics Institute. “For businesses, this changes the growth model. Products and services that support longer use and offer consumers greater choice are becoming a more consistent part of the market.”

As we’ve covered before at Fight to Repair, the rise of resale and repair economies represents a powerful counterweight to the throwaway culture that’s dominated retail for decades.

The takeaway for businesses is clear: building infrastructure for resale, rental, and repair isn’t just good for the planet—it’s becoming a competitive necessity in a market where consumers increasingly vote with their wallets for sustainability.

Read more at Green Retail World

Germany Declares Volunteer Repairers “Professionals” But Obstacles To Repair Persist

For years, Europe’s Ecodesign rules have required manufacturers to provide spare parts and repair information to “professional repairers.” The problem? Nobody could agree on who counted as one. In practice, that often meant independent volunteers at Repair Cafés and community repair events—the people keeping thousands of products out of the waste stream—were left out.

Germany has finally taken a big step toward fixing that. As reported by Repair.eu, the new Ecodesign Act passed by Germany’s Parliament (Bundestag) explicitly recognizes skilled volunteer repair initiatives as “professional repairers,” giving them the same legal right to access parts and repair information as commercial repair shops. It’s a significant victory for the repair movement, recognizing that repair isn’t just a business—it’s a public good.

But the law isn’t perfect. Manufacturers still retain broad discretion over how repairers prove they qualify, and Germany stopped short of creating a clear, standardized verification system for independent repairers. That leaves room for unnecessary bureaucracy and the possibility that some companies will continue using paperwork—not technology—to slow independent repair.

Still, the broader trend is unmistakable. Across Europe, lawmakers are beginning to recognize that extending product lifespans requires more than telling consumers to repair—it requires ensuring the people willing to do the repairs can actually get the parts, manuals, and information they need. Germany has taken an important step. The next challenge is making sure manufacturers can’t undermine it with red tape.

Read more at Repair.eu

The Smart Speaker That Doesn’t Spy? Meet PineVoice!

For years, buying a smart speaker has meant making a trade: convenience in exchange for handing your voice—and often your home—to Big Tech’s cloud. Pine64’s new PineVoice challenges that assumption with a $50, open-hardware smart speaker designed to work for you, not for a surveillance business model.

Instead of Alexa or Google Assistant, which constantly monitor conversations and upload data to cloud-based servers run by their parent company, PineVoice runs open-source firmware on a RISC-V processor and is built as a local voice satellite for Home Assistant. Wake-word detection happens on the device itself, not on a remote server, and the hardware includes a physical microphone mute button, open documentation, and firmware that users can inspect, modify, and improve. That combination makes it less of a locked-down appliance and more of a platform the community can actually own.

The project is still early—Pine64 warns that wake-word performance and software are a work in progress—but that’s almost beside the point. PineVoice demonstrates that smart home devices don’t have to be disposable black boxes tied to a single vendor’s cloud. They can be repairable, hackable, and built around user control instead of planned dependence.

If the future of connected devices is going to respect ownership, privacy, and repair, it may look a lot more like this than another always-listening cylinder from Silicon Valley.

Read more at: OMG! Ubuntu article

Surprise! (Not): Meta Adds Paywall to AI Smart Glasses

Subscription creep has reached another frontier: the features built into devices you already own.

Meta quietly announced that owners of its AI smart glasses will soon face monthly usage limits on Conversation Focus, a feature that enhances the voice of the person you’re speaking with in noisy environments. Use it for more than three hours a month, and you’ll need to pay $19.99 for a Meta One Premium subscription to keep going. The catch? According to testing by The Verge, Conversation Focus runs entirely on the glasses themselves—even without an internet connection. In other words, this isn’t cloud computing. It’s a software gate wrapped around hardware you’ve already paid for.

That’s a troubling direction. Consumers have spent years fighting for the right to repair products they own. Now they’ll increasingly have to fight for the right to use them without hitting an artificial limit. If companies can turn local, on-device features into recurring revenue streams with a software update, ownership starts looking a lot more like a lease.

Meta says the subscription is optional and that most users won’t reach the limit, but it also left the door open to placing additional features behind the paywall in the future. That’s the part worth watching. Once manufacturers normalize charging monthly fees for capabilities already built into your hardware, the line between buying a product and renting access to it gets a little blurrier.

Read more at The Verge

The conventional wisdom is that AI is set to eliminate large numbers jobs in the knowledge industry, from entry-level software developers to customer support agents to graphic designers, content writers and copy editors. At the same time, jobs that are more skill-based than knowledge based will survive - plumbers, builders, electricians, … and repair technicians, right?

Maybe not. A number of studies suggest that the common view of our AI-powered future economy may be way too simplistic. Rather than simply killing jobs, AI -powered tools and technology may greatly expand the job market, in the same way that the earlier computer and Internet revolutions transformed professions like accounting, inventory management and so on.

That may include the elimination of some low level and entry level jobs that can be easily automated. But the AI revolution may also see high-skill work like electronics repair become more broadly accessible to workers.

The proof? Wrench Board: an AI-powered diagnostic workbench based on Anthropic’s Claude Opus, and an advanced AI model designed to do software engineering and solve complex workflows. Wrench Board and its creator, Alexis Chapellier, were awarded with the Silver Medal at Anthropic’s recent Built with Opus 4.7 hackathon, a global virtual competition in which 500 contestants chosen from more than 20,000 applicants were given one week to build an open source solution with Claude Code.

Powered by Opus, Wrench Board is described by Chapellier as a “bench teammate for board-level repair,” capable of reading a full circuit board schematic and boardview, then helping users to facilitate board level repairs. The potential is to democratize skills held by the most experienced electronics repair technicians.

“This is a very promising approach,” said Kyle Wiens, the founder and CEO of iFixit. “Fixers are capable of mighty feats, and our board repair school graduates do sophisticated circuit board repairs every day.”

The key will be getting access to the information needed to train tools like Wrench Board. But with spreading right to repair laws in 10 U.S. states requiring manufacturers to make information like schematic diagrams available to electronics owners, that barrier may be falling. “The files are still very rare. So getting companies to share those files will be the limiter in whether fixers can use amazing new technology like this,” Wiens said.

To learn more about WrenchBoard, Fight to Repair Editor Paul Roberts connected with Alexis Chapellier and asked him to describe his inspiration for the winning project, how AI is set to transform repair and what’s coming next with the Wrench Board platform.

Read on to hear what Alexis had to say!

The Technology Behind Wrench Board

F2R: For readers unfamiliar with board-level repair, what exactly does Wrench Board do?

Alexis: Wrench Board is a bench teammate for board-level repair. You give it a schematic PDF and a boardview of the device, and it builds a knowledge pack specific to that device in about two minutes. Then a diagnostic agent powered by Claude Opus 4.7 drives the board visually with you, highlighting pins, tracing nets, simulating faults, while you keep the soldering iron in hand. The agent can also see what you see, through a USB microscope or webcam connected to the bench. The whole session is replayable later. The bet is simple: precision over magic. The agent is not allowed to invent a component reference, and that’s the core of the architecture.

F2R: What basic skills do Wrench Board users need? Can someone who has never done board repairs use it to do (simple) board repairs?

Alexis: There are two distinct uses. The first is learning: anyone can use Wrench Board to explore a device, and the agent builds a first informative memory of the board, so you can learn a great deal without even having the device in front of you.

The second is real diagnostics: there you need the tooling (microscope, iron, multimeter) and the electronics fundamentals. Wrench Board lowers the barrier to board-level work, but it doesn’t replace the iron in your hand. What it gives you is access to the equivalent of a senior colleague for the reasoning, something most independent technicians have never had.

Read more

The decision to shut down the API was part of a VW plan to “transition to the next generation of vehicle interfaces,” according to a company statement from early April, as reported by the german publication Heise.

VW owners were using Home Assistant to create a wide range of automations that VW’s own software and applications didn’t offer. Those included fine grained vehicle charging policies synchronized with peak rooftop solar output and low electricity prices, custom notifications and more, Carscoops noted. Now, that functionality appears to be dead in the water thanks to VW’s back-end change, angering VW owners.

On Reddit, visitors to the /homeassistant subreddit, including VW owners, expressed their anger over the company’s action.

“I’m very disappointed. 75k for a car and they are not even providing the API,” wrote a user with the handle Hoobi111. “It’s a joke. I own two electric VW cars, and they are my last. I mean it.”

Read more

The amendment, introduced by Rep. Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), would establish “government purpose rights” as the default for technical data and software delivered under future Department of Defense contracts, unless contractors can prove they deserve more restrictive protections. It also attempts to curb abusive data-marking practices that have allowed contractors to lock the military out of repair information for equipment it already owns.

Congressman Pat Harrigan, whose own bipartisan amendment was adopted during markup, called the measure “a real win for readiness, innovation, and the taxpayer.”

But legal experts warn that the Goodlander amendment does little to address the thousands of existing weapons systems, vehicles, aircraft, and support equipment already trapped behind proprietary repair restrictions.

A Right* To Repair!

When the House passed its version of the NDAA last week, headlines trumpeted the inclusion of the right to repair language in spite of strong objections from major defense contractors and some senior House members. During the debate, House Arm Services Committee Chair Mike D. Rogers (R-AL) was quoted saying the amendment creates a bigger problem than it solves by forcing “companies to choose between protecting their IP and working with the Department of Defense.”

But military right to repair opponents weren’t the only ones disappointed by the repair language in the House’s version of the NDAA. Writing about the House draft, Nathan Proctor, the right to repair campaign director at U.S. PIRG that the bill’s language “would likely keep repair restrictions in place” because it lacks meaningful, enforceable requirements compelling contractors to provide repair materials for systems already in service.

The seeming tension between an owner’s right to repair or modify equipment they own and manufacturers’ “intellectual property rights” is a common theme in the debate over right to repair legislation. But legal experts say there isn’t much legal precedent to support the idea that repair related information is protected by IP laws.

“Even if valid trade secrets exist, there are established processes for protecting them using non-disclosure agreements that are common not only in military procurement but in the private sector as well,” Aaron Perzanowski, the Thomas W. Lacchia Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School wrote in an email to Fight to Repair News.

Materials like service manuals and schematics, have “at best, very thin copyright protection since they are factual and describe unprotectable diagnostic and repair processes,” Perzanowski wrote. “Firms license the use of their copyrighted materials to customers as a matter of course. If the Pentagon insists on the right to access those documents to keep the equipment it buys operational, that’s just a cost of doing business if firms want lucrative government contracts.”

That concern is not theoretical. The Department of Defense spends tens of billions of dollars each year on contractor-controlled sustainment and maintenance. A recent Senate hearing saw the Secretary of the Army highlight a frequent repair for Blackhawk helicopters in which a simple knob replacement - that the military could complete at a cost of between $8 and $15 instead saw the military charged $40,000 by Lockheed Martin, the Blackhawk’s manufacturer.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) called out that phenomenon, writing last week that repair restrictions force taxpayers to pay monopoly prices for maintenance while limiting military readiness and operational flexibility. “Enabling the military to conduct its own repairs and maintenance of equipment saves taxpayer dollars, protects service members, and enhances national security,” the organization wrote in a recent letter to Congress.

Repair powers readiness

The problem is that readiness requires more than improved contracting language going forward. It requires guaranteeing that soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines can access the tools, parts, software, and technical documentation needed to repair equipment today.

Repair advocates learned this lesson the hard way last year when strong military right-to-repair provisions were stripped from the final FY26 NDAA after intense lobbying from defense contractors.

Congress deserves credit for moving the conversation forward. But before the FY27 NDAA reaches the President’s desk, lawmakers should strengthen these provisions, expand them to existing systems, and ensure the military receives actual repair rights—not merely promises of better contracting practices in the future.

The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee is holding (closed) meetings from June 8 - 10 to mark up its version of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Right to repair advocates are hopeful that the initial Senate draft will include a robust military right to repair provision.

Stay tuned for more coverage of the military right to repair. And use this form to reach out to your congresspeople to urge them to give military service members a right to repair!

Other News

Trump to Automakers: Why Can’t People Fix Their Own Cars?

Right to repair just got an unexpected boost from the Oval Office.

In a meeting with executives from Ford, GM, and other auto industry leaders, President Trump publicly questioned efforts to limit vehicle repairs by owners and independent shops. “We had the auto industry in yesterday… they don’t want people to fix their car,” Trump said, adding that automakers “want a bill that prohibits people from fixing” their own vehicles, Ford Authority reported.

The statement is just the latest in which the President has signaled support for a right to repair. And the significance of those comments is hard to ignore. For years, automakers have fought efforts to guarantee vehicle owners access to the diagnostic data, software tools, and repair information needed to maintain increasingly computerized cars. The battle has only intensified as modern vehicles become rolling software platforms and control of repair data becomes a multi-billion-dollar business, Reuters reported.

Industry groups argue that independent shops already perform most repairs and that additional access could create cybersecurity and safety concerns. Repair advocates counter that automakers’ growing control over vehicle data raises costs, reduces competition, and leaves consumers with fewer choices.

For right-to-repair supporters, the moment is notable not because it settles the debate, but because it highlights how difficult it has become to defend the idea that owners should control the products they buy. As Trump put it: “There’s a move on to stop people from fixing their cars.”

That’s a conversation the repair movement has been having for years. Now it’s one happening at the highest levels of government.

Read more at Ford Authority and Reuters

The Tractor That Refuses to Become E-Waste

For decades, farmers have faced a brutal choice: pay eye-watering repair bills, wait weeks for dealer service, or retire equipment that should have years of life left. Now a startup called Ursa AG is betting there’s another way.

Read more

Read more

That was a clear message from many of the country’s top right to repair advocates who gathered at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia last week for CANRepair, Canada’s annual repair convention. In talks over two days, leading right to repair advocates called for reforms like a Canadian federal right to repair to build a more affordable and sustainable future in a multi-polar world.

“We’re living through a shifting time. And right to repair really fits into a lot of conversations we’re having. In Canada that’s about what does the future look like where we have to be a bit more multi-polar,” said Anthony Rosborough, President of the Canadian Repair Coalition and an Assistant Professor of Law and Computer Science at Dalhousie University in an interview with Fight to Repair News.

“Canada has been a country that, for a long time, has been dependent on a few, very stable relationships which we hope will continue, but there are some doubts…Those conversations about how the right to repair fits into the Canadian moment have been really interesting.”

Rosborough and other speakers called for the Canadian federal- and provincial governments to take up right to repair legislation and other reforms, including instituting a federal repair index and curbing monopolies and anti-competitive practices that are inflating costs for consumers and businesses.

Repairing the Economy

Speakers at CANRepair saw the recent shifts in Canada’s geopolitical orientation in the face of U.S. tariffs and a strained relationship with its southern neighbor as an opportunity for meaningful economic reforms.

Read more

Still, those warnings and strong, bipartisan support in both Democratic and Republican led Congresses haven’t gotten the military right to repair over the line. It was just last December that Congress cut military right to repair language from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) after lobbyists for defense contractors swarmed key lawmakers and convinced them to pull the repair provisions, which enjoyed bipartisan support and was championed by the Trump administration.

Despite repeated defeats, the tide behind the push for a military right to repair may be shifting as stories about the outrageous costs of the military repair monopoly become hard to ignore.

In a Senate hearing last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D MA) pressed Army leadership on military repair restrictions — and got a striking admission in response. The Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll, publicly called on Congress to authorize broader military right-to-repair authority, directly undercutting years of contractor arguments against reform.

To support his call for a military right to repair, Driscoll gave lawmakers a glimpse into the jaw-dropping costs to taxpayers of the U.S. Military’s inability to repair its own equipment.

Driscoll described a recurring problem with the military’s Blackhawk helicopters. Every month, four or more Blackhawks have a knob that breaks and needs to be replaced. The simple and most cost effective fix is for the military to just 3D print a replacement knob. That takes about an hour and costs around $8 per knob, Driscoll explained. However, the military’s contract with Lockheed Martin, which owns Sikorsky, the maker of Blackhawks, prohibits that, citing intellectual property (IP) rights. The result: Lockheed replaces the entire system attached to the broken knob at a cost of $40,000 each.

That means instead of replacing four knobs at an annual cost to taxpayers of roughly $380 and keeping BlackHawks in service, the military takes the copters out of service for extended periods so Lockheed Martin can replace much larger systems at an annual cost to taxpayers of around $2 million.

The exchange cuts to a problem that has simmered for years inside the Department of Defense: the military often buys highly advanced equipment but lacks the legal or technical ability to repair it independently. Contractors retain control over software, diagnostics, manuals, and proprietary parts, leaving the armed forces dependent on outside vendors for maintenance and readiness.

Secretary Driscoll told senators that U.S. soldiers have trouble accessing information needed to service and repair equipment in peacetime. In a war situation, however, not having access to the right to repair “could be the decisive point between us being successful somewhere 6,000 miles away in the Indo-Pacific or failing our mission if we cannot repair our equipment,” he said.

Military vendors are countering calls for a military right to repair by proposing “data as a service” for military equipment which would allow companies to meter DoD staff each time they access repair materials or data. That would likely only make the costs of equipment maintenance soar. As Warren pointed out: a defense contracting company already charges the Air Force $900 a page for upgrades to its maintenance manuals.

“Data as a service is just another attempt to gouge American taxpayers and put our service members at risk,” said Warren.

Repair advocates have long argued that these restrictions don’t just raise costs — they weaken operational resilience. If equipment can only be repaired through manufacturer-controlled channels, delays become inevitable and taxpayer-funded hardware effectively remains under private control.

Manufacturers’ argument that the military can’t be trusted with that information is “one of the more preposterous things I have heard,” Driscoll said.

The hearing also shows how far the right-to-repair movement has expanded. What started as a fight over tractors, phones, and consumer electronics is now reshaping debates about national security, procurement, and public infrastructure. Even the military is increasingly asking the same question consumers have been asking for years: if we bought it, why can’t we fix it?

Other News

Amazon Is About to Strand Older Kindles. Users Are Fighting Back

Amazon is preparing to cut off store access for older Kindle devices, and customers are reacting like people who just realized their “purchased” hardware came with an expiration date.

Consumer advocates at PIRG are calling on Amazon to reverse course, arguing the shutdown will prematurely obsolete still-functional e-readers while pushing users toward unnecessary upgrades. Meanwhile, frustrated Kindle owners are responding with something increasingly common in the right-to-repair world: jailbreaking. Digital Trends reports that users are rushing to unlock their devices before Amazon’s changes take effect, trying to preserve local control and continued functionality.

The controversy underscores a broader shift in consumer tech. Devices that once worked independently now depend on cloud services, app stores, and ongoing corporate permission to remain fully usable. When support disappears, perfectly functional hardware can suddenly lose core features overnight.

It’s the same pattern consumers have already seen with smart thermostats, printers, and connected appliances: companies retain long-term control over products after sale, while users absorb the cost when ecosystems shut down.

Read more at PIRG | Daily Star | Digital Trends

Read more

A new class action lawsuit filed in federal court in Illinois is taking aim at what plaintiffs describe as John Deere’s growing repair monopoly — this time in the company’s construction and forestry business.

The lawsuit was filed on Thursday by Chicago-based Christy Webber Landscapes, …

Read more

In a video posted on Saturday, repair professional and YouTube star Louis Rossmann of FULU Foundation pledged $10,000 to support independent software developer Pawel Jarczak’s defense of his open source “OrcaSlicer-BambuLab” project against legal threats from Bambu Lab.

The Bambu Handcuffs

Jarczak’s project is a fork of the popular OrcaSlicer open source project that allows Bambu 3D printer owners to bypass Bambu Connect, a middleware application distributed by Bambu Lab that enables— but gives Bambu control over— OrcaSlicer’s access to essential remote printer functions like print initiation, motion control, calibrations, remote video, and firmware upgrades.

As reported, Bambu Connect effectively cut off direct access between Bambu model printers and popular 3rd party software or hardware upgrades such as OrcaSlicer or BigTreeTech’s Panda Touch screen in 2025. At the time, Bambu cited the cybersecurity risks of publicly accessible 3D printers and required users of its printers to download “Bambu Connect” to act as a one-way go-between that eliminated users ability to modify.

That matters because Bambu Lab offers cloud-managed printers that rely on an Internet-connected ecosystem and centralized cloud server to enable features like remote printing, monitoring, and file management. But that centralized, cloud ecosystem also gives Bambu the ability to block access from printers that don’t align with its policies.

For Rossmann, the company’s decision to arbitrarily disable features that customers assumed were permanent is part of a dark pattern in which manufacturers use their control over device firmware to lock in customers.

“We’re sick and (expletive) tired of people going after developers that simply allow you to get back access to what you bought and paid for and use it in the way that you were able to use it when you bought the goddamn hardware,” Rossmann said. “In my opinion, you bought it, you owned it, and you should not have to deal with any of this type of legal crap for simply making something that allows people to use what they want to use it in the way that they wanted to.”

The conflict between Jarczak and Bambu reportedly centers on the ability of Bambu users and developers to restore or modifying 3D printer features through software workarounds — the kind of tinkering that has historically driven innovation in 3D printer enthusiast communities, including Bambu’s.

Open Source. Closed Access

In a blog post on Thursday, Bambu Lab said its issue with Jarczak’s project was not with open source slicer’s like OrcaSlicer, but Jarczak’s code, which poses as Bambu’s Connect app in order to interact with the company’s cloud-based servers which are needed to operate Bambu printers.

Read more

The Colorado House State, Civic, Military, & Veterans Affairs committee voted 7-4 to reject the bill, which narrowly passed the Colorado Senate on April 16th following a high pressure campaign from tech industry groups like TechNet and firms like Cisco and IBM, which hired scores of lobbyists to push passage of the bill.

As we reported, SB26-090 sought to exempt business to business technology such as servers, routers, switches and other devices from the state’s right to repair law under the guise of protecting “critical infrastructure.”

Early versions of the bill created a sweeping carve-out for any information technology equipment “intended” for use in critical infrastructure -citing the federal definition of “critical infrastructure” as physical or virtual systems and assets “so vital to the U.S. that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on national security, economy, public health, or safety.”

Following strong pushback from Coloradans and repair advocates, the bill was amended to contain a conditional exemption subject to review by the state Attorney General, along with clear eligibility criteria. However, the bill also permitted firms denied an exemption by the Colorado AG’s rulings to appeal them in court, setting the stage for long and costly battles by wealthy tech firms eager to maintain a monopoly on service and repair.

Despite that, the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 22 - 13. The next step was the Colorado House.

Proponents: critical infrastructure exemption is “narrow”

At a nearly three hour hearing on the bill on Monday, the sponsors, Republican Representative Anthony Hartsook and Democrat Representative Chad Clifford, endorsed the amended legislation as “narrowly focused” on the technology that operates critical infrastructure, and not applicable to business technologies.

Read more

Now the bad news: the bill that argument was used to support, SB26-090, passed through the Colorado Senate anyway on Thu…

Read more

On Thursday, the Colorado Senate’s Committee on Business, Labor, & Technology voted unanimously to advance SB26-090, proposed legislation that would amend the state’s Consumer Repair Bill of Rights Act to exempt “information technology equipment” used in critical infrastructure from the law. That would remove the manufacturers of such systems from requirements to provide device owners and independent repair professionals with the same access to repair tools, parts and documentation like schematic diagrams and service manuals as authorized repair providers.

If passed, SB26-090 removes a critical piece from the most expansive right to repair anywhere in the U.S. Specifically: Colorado’s law includes a right for Colorado businesses that own IT equipment like servers, routers, switches, firewalls to access the information and tools needed to fix those devices or hire independent repair shops to do it.

In a hearing on April 2nd, Senator John Carson, a sponsor of the bill,  assured committee members that SB26-090 is “not a retreat” from the victory of the state’s strong consumer right to repair law. Rather, its “a narrow targeted clarification that the broad consumer protections in our right to repair law” aren’t intended to apply to critical infrastructure. “We’re talking about power grids, water systems, financial networks. The kind of infrastructures whose incapacity as federal law defines it would have a debilitating effect on the nation,” he said.

An expensive carve out for Big Tech

That sounds reasonable - but its plain language that disguises a broad attack on the right to repair.

Some background: many other states that have passed an electronics right to repair bills did so after bowing to Big Tech lobbyists representing firms like Cisco and IBM, creating a carve-out for B2B technology - a roughly $65 billion industry providing the hardware, software and cloud based services that power large and small businesses in the U.S. Think: email- and database servers, routers, switches, firewalls, and on and on.

Just like the carve outs in state right to repair laws for gaming consoles like xBox and Sony Playstation, there’s zero logic behind a B2B technology exclusion from the right to repair. If the power supply breaks on my network router or a capacitor fails on the circuit board, shouldn’t I be able to pop open the device and replace it ??!

The answer from Big Tech is “no.” And the reasoning: Who cares?!

As with the carve out for gaming consoles: the barrier to repair has nothing to do with the underlying technology and everything to do with the millions of dollars massive companies like Sony, Microsoft, Cisco or IBM have to spend on lobbyists that can shield them from the kind of free market competition the right to repair enables.

Read more

The settlement addresses claims that Deere used software locks and restrictive practices to limit farmers’ ability to repair their own machinery—forcing them to rely on authorized dealers.

As we reported at the time: the suit was filed in Federal court in Chicago by Forest River Farms, a North Dakota farm on behalf of John Deere customers who, it claims, “paid artificially inflated prices for Deere Repair Services” as a result of Deere policies that violate the federal Sherman Anti Trust Act.

“Prices in the Repair Services Market exceeded the amount they would have paid if the prices had been determined by a competitive market,” the suit alleges. Additional farmers joined the suit in the months and years that followed. Then, in January of this year, the FTC along with the attorneys general of Minnesota and Illinois announced it was suing Deere & Company “over its use of unfair practices that have driven up equipment repair costs for farmers.”

At the heart of the case is a familiar complaint in the broader right-to-repair movement: that modern equipment, which is increasingly dependent on proprietary software, is effectively controlled by manufacturers even after purchase. Farmers argued that Deere’s practices inflated repair costs and caused costly delays during critical planting and harvesting windows. According to the lawsuit, these restrictions “forced farmers to pay inflated prices for repairs and parts,” reinforcing what critics describe as a monopolized repair ecosystem.

Read more