The Week in Repair: Feb 8-15
Right to Repair: the TED talk. Also “Yes,” you can repair your UGGs. European parliament paves way for replaceable batteries.
TED Talk: You deserve the right to repair your stuff
A self-declared "repair geek," Gay Gordon-Byrne is a driving force behind the right-to-repair movement, which aims to empower people to fix their stuff. She describes how the movement is gaining legislative momentum and breaks down how the global shift away from "throwaway society" can literally turn trash into treasure in a circular economy -- so we can all experience that "Yes! I fixed it!" feeling. (Ted.com)
🛠️ Nathan Proctor on the Growing Right to Repair Movement
“You buy stuff. It breaks or doesn’t work right,” US PIRG says on its Right to Repair page. “You could throw it away and buy new stuff, but you’d rather repair it. But then you find out you can’t do it yourself, you can’t even bring it to a third party repair shop. You have to bring it back to the original company, which can charge an arm and a leg because there’s no competition – and sometimes they just won’t fix it. And you decide to throw the thing away.”
“The way these items are manufactured is so different than when these products lasted a long time. Companies don’t have their own manufacturing facilities. They are accumulating components from these factory cities. They are just buying parts and assembling them. They don’t take the same level of care in making sure the products are going to be durable.They are just scrabbling them together. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t.” (corporatecrimereporter.com)
🚧 iFixit: The Five Major Hurdles to Right to Repair
As manufacturers have rolled out mechanisms to artificially force people to replace their products more often, iFixit has been fighting back. Through a conjunction of open source activism and political pressure, we’re beginning to reset the damage done over the last few decades to consumer expectations and manufacturer behavior. Major hurdles to reclaiming repair include:
Limited accessibility to spare parts for independent repair shops and DIY fixers
Manufacturers fabricating parts exclusively for companies, and agreeing to not sell parts to repair shops and consumers
Minimal access to schematics, information, and guides on how to maintain and repair devices
Not having the tools to fix devices
Products that are not being designed with repair in mind
💰 Why aren't more products easy to repair?
Repair advocates argue that manufacturers are stifling competition and raising prices by requiring customers to go to authorized repair facilities and restricting access to original parts or service manuals. Electronic access or diagnostic codes may be proprietary, effectively preventing repair, or a product might require special tools to fix if it’s built with glue instead of screws, or with integrated lithium “pouch” batteries instead of easier-to-replace cylindrical formats.
A repair might just be so expensive that buying new is cheaper. I was told it would cost over $200 to replace the light bulb in my microwave, so I heat things up in the dark now. The Executive Director of The Repair Assocation, Gay Gordon-Byrne, testified that he bought a new $189 microwave to avoid paying $600 for a new circuit board. “I’ve now contributed to both the solid waste problem and the e-waste problem. Every consumer does this with every broken gadget.” (paloaltoonline.com)
🥾 Take Care of It: My 15-Year-Old Uggs Look Brand New
In November, UGG announced its "UGGrenew” in-house initiative to restore previously-loved Uggs. The brand has partnered with NuShoe, a premium shoe repair company to offer three tiers of service based on the condition of the boot: Renew ($80), a “complete, handcrafted restoration” that includes adding new bindings, outsole, and steam cleaning and deodorizing inside and out; Restore ($60), steam cleaning and a new outsole; Refresh ($40), just the steam clean.
Eric Neuner, president of NuShoe, alludes to the suffering of the shoe repair industry over the course of his 27 years in business, due to the “disposable nature of society.” But in the urgent call for more sustainable consumption, repair services like his are regaining popularity, especially with younger consumers. He actually brought his teenage daughter into his initial pitch meeting with UGG, where she shared her generation’s understanding of their purchases’ impact and the Right to Repair, proving that this is the direction consumption is headed. (marieclaire.com)
Results are in: Californians across political spectrum support right to repair
You may have encountered manufacturer-imposed restrictions on tools and repair parts, which limited your options. This is common, and it forces consumers to go to a "manufacturer- authorized" servicer, which leads to higher repair costs and, infuriatingly, often the need to just buy a completely new device.
It turns out that Californians are fed up with this. According to a recently conducted survey, a vast majority of Californians support the “Right to Repair,” a movement that aims to fix this broken system. (calpirg.org)
Tester says 'Right to Repair' bill will keep family farms viable
Senator John Tester on proposed Senate legislation ensuring a right to repair agricultural equipment.
Also read:
The European Parliament paves the way for removable and replaceable batteries
The Environment Committee of the European Parliament overwhelmingly adopted an ambitious report on the European Battery Regulation (74 to 8). This is an important hurdle towards establishing much awaited laws which will apply to all batteries sold on the European market.
Although covering a wide number of issues, the regulation is also expected to support a right to replace and repair batteries in consumer electronics. Existing legislation for batteries does not explicitly address lithium batteries, despite them quickly becoming the dominant battery chemistry and leaving behind a vast environmental footprint. Lithium batteries are found in everything from smartphones to scooters, electric cars and energy storage for smart grids. (repair.eu)
Also read:
The EU intends to ban integrated batteries in telephones and electronic devices (balkangreenenergynews.com)
Litigation Over Massachusetts’ “Right to Repair” Law Continues
The federal judge in Alliance for Automotive Innovation v. Healy said he was close to a verdict but that he needed more information from the Alliance as to why it did not disclose that the new Subaru and Kia vehicles complied with the ”right to repair” technical requirements that the complaint claimed are impossible to follow. Judge Douglas Woodlock said, “We will ask whether we are dealing with concerted ignorance, willful blindness or simply ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’” The Alliance claims that it did not find out about the Subaru and Kia vehicles until after the evidence was presented to the judge last fall. Judge Woodlock said he was “trying to figure out why I should be as irritated as I am.” (natlawreview.com)
🧰 Right to Repair Bill Could Allow More Independent Shops to Work on Hybrids and EVs
Independent shops have more difficult working on modern cars because of the need to access vehicle data, according to the release. A 2014 memorandum of understanding was supposed to give independent shops equal access to the software tools used by dealerships, but since then wireless transmission capability has created a new obstacle, a release from Rush's office explained.
Most new cars collect data from onboard sensors, which is increasingly getting transmitted directly to automakers. Limited access to vehicle data already affects repairs for 37% of vehicles in the United States, and that will likely increase as wireless data transmission continues to proliferate, Rush claims. The REPAIR Act is meant to address that, and aim to stop franchised dealerships from monopolizing repairs and maintenance. (greencarreports.com)
⚖️ Class action suit says Brother illegally restricts printer repair
Bob Konkel, bought a Brother Color Inkject All-in-One Printer in January 2020 from a Staples store in Massachusetts The printer began to malfunction slightly not long after he bought it, the complaint alleges. It claims that Konkel “would have liked to endeavored to repair his product himself during the warranty period, but his warranty as written prohibited him from doing so.”
The complaint alleges, “Tying arrangements that condition a consumer product’s warranty on the use of a specific repair service in this manner violate state and federal law. Further, [the Brother companies] exacerbate these violations by stating on the outside of the product packaging that the Products include a limited warranty, but the unlawful repair restriction is not reasonably revealed to consumers until after the point of sale.” (classactionsreporter.com)
Mythbusters’ Adam Savage talks Right to Repair
In early January, the Right to Repair team and our national network organized a Right to Repair State Summit to hear from the keynote speaker Adam Savage from MythBusters on his thoughts on the Right to Repair and to discuss our current progress on the Right to Repair campaign. While we've made a lot of strong progress on the campaign in 2021—we won commitments from Apple and Microsoft to support our Right to Repair movement and we got the Federal Trade Commission to take a supportive stance in front of Congress—we as consumers have yet to see an established consumer right to repair our things when they break.
"The Right to Repair movement speaks to the very core of what I believe are the most important human endeavors," said Adam Savage, former producer of MythBusters. ”The Right to Repair is about securing the right to be unreasonable, to experiment and to make things better for ourselves." (illinoispirg.org)
FixIt Clinic’s Peter Mui on Ralph Nader Radio Hour
Ralph and the boys have a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Peter Mui, founder of the Fixit Clinic, a worldwide organization that holds “pop up” events where experts teach you how to repair your consumer goods, which not only keeps them out of the landfill but is also a community-based activity that conveys critical thinking skills. (ralphnaderradiohour.com)
The Crapification of the US Economy is now complete
One aspect nobody seems to notice is the transformation from a society that once drew its identity from producing quality goods and services to a society that draws its identity from consuming crapified goods and services. Now that Americans define themselves by consuming, they are enslaved to consumption: to limit consumption is to disappear--and 'spending time" on social media is a form of consumption, even if no goods or services are purchased directly, as one's attention / time are valuable commodities.
In other words, Americans have been trained like Pavlov's dogs to consume, no matter how poor the quality and service. We just buy it anyway, and grumble over the decaying quality and service--but we won't take the only action that would impact corporations and the government: stop buying the products and services. Opt out, drop out, make it at home, cancel the service, just stop buying abysmally made junk and pathetically poor services. (zerohedge.com)
⚖️ Appeals Court Can Rule That DMCA's Anti-Circumvention Rules Are Unconstitutional
DMCA 1201, which is the anti-circumvention rules -- or you could call it the "DRM" part of the law. This has no redeeming value whatsoever. Under 1201 basically any attempt to circumvent a "technological" protection measure, can be deemed infringing even if the underlying content is never infringed upon.
This isn't just an issue for big companies. This is about fundamental fair use rights of the public -- which Congress tossed away decades ago, and tried to pave over by insisting the Librarian of Congress could swoop in every 3 years and stop the most egregious attacks on free speech. But that's not how the 1st Amendment works. (techdirt.com)
🏛️ President Biden Doubles Down His Support for “Right-to-Repair”
In his comments, the president addressed what he considered as positive developments in right-to-repair space. As he noted, since his July 2021 executive order issued, the FTC has unanimously announced that it will ramp up enforcement against illegal repair restriction. In doing so, the Commission stated that “it would target repair restrictions that violate antitrust laws enforced by the FTC and the FTC Act’s prohibitions on unfair and deceptive acts or practices. The Commission also urged the public to submit complaints of Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act violations, which prohibits, among other things, tying a consumer’s product warranty to the use of a specific service provider or product, unless the FTC has issued a waiver
Less than two weeks after the president issued new comments on the right to repair, Montana Senator Jon Tester introduced his Agriculture Right to Repair Act — a bill aimed at “guarantee[ing] farmers the right to repair their own equipment and end[ing] current restrictions on the repair market.” (regulatoryoversight.com)
🌎 Repair Cafés and Carbon Emissions
Using the vast efforts of Project Drawdown, we see immediately what a Repair Café can do for us — instantly extending the Useful Life of the products we own, which then reduces the need to go out and buy another whatever; moving us toward a truly Circular Economy, in which Zero Waste is the outcome. It also offers the community a chance to transfer knowledge and skills to the generations coming into their own.
Moving education into the realm of the practical is a valuable effort to begin with, but working at transferring the ability to work with tools to fix lamps, bicycles, jewelry, clothing and everything else to our young people is priceless. The time we take now to involve our young people in Intergenerational efforts will benefit us all greatly — not in 20 years, but in a matter of hours. (eastendbeacon.com)
Other Repair News...
8 Class Action Lawsuits Against Facebook Reassigned to New Judge (topclassactions.com)
Why it’s important the U.S. moves on right to repair (autoserviceworld.com)
I-Team: car repair law passed by Mass voters not yet being enforced (wwlp.com)
IEEE adds NFC protocol to safeguard access to motor vehicle event data recorders (nfcw.com)
Used device management firm nets investment (resource-recycling.com)
Nintendo hacker Gary Bowser sentenced to 40 months in jail after pleading guilty (newshub.co.nz)
Careers: Army Computer/Detection Systems Repairer – MOS-94F (thebalancecareers.com)
E-waste is an opportunity to transition to a circular economy (recyclingproductnews.com)
IIT-M initiative and residents’ group combine to create data on e-waste (www.thehindu.com)
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