Right to repair is a legal right for owners of devices and equipment to freely maintain, repair, or modify products such as automobiles, electronics, and farm equipment.
Common obstacles to repair include requirements to use only the manufacturer's maintenance services, restrictions on access to tools and components, and software barriers. These obstacles represent a repair monopoly, an aftermarket monopoly where a company controls the market for repairing and maintaining their products, making it difficult or even impossible for anyone to fix them. This can take the form of making it challenging or prohibitively expensive for individuals or independent third parties to get access to parts, manuals, or diagnostic tools. The purpose of repair monopolies is to force customers to either use the manufacturer's own repair services or purchase new equipment from the manufacturer.
Repair monopolies have been found to lead to higher prices, increased delays, reduced serviceability, and less choice for consumers. Proponents for the right to repair point to the benefits in affordability, sustainability, and availability of critical supplies in times of crisis. There is a social movement of citizens putting pressure on their governments to enact laws protecting a right to repair.
Impacts While initially driven mostly by automotive consumer protection agencies and the automotive after sales service industry, the discussion about establishing a right to repair, not only for vehicles but for any kind of electronic product, gained traction as consumer electronics such as smartphones and computers became universally available, causing broken and used electronics items to become the fastest growing waste stream. Today it is estimated that more than half of the population of the western world has one or more used or broken electronic devices at home that are not economically repairable.
In addition to the consumer goods, healthcare equipment repair access made news at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when hospitals had trouble getting maintenance for some critical high-demand medical equipment, most notably ventilators.
The pandemic has also been credited with helping to grow the right-to-repair movement since many repair shops were closed. The Economist also cites the expectation that owners of products should be able to repair them as a sense of moral justice or property rights. Those fighting against planned obsolescence have also taken note of when repair costs exceed replacement costs because the companies that created the product have retained a monopoly on its repair, driving up prices.
Definition
Right to repair refers to the concept that end users of technical, electronic or automotive devices should be allowed to freely repair these products. Some notable aspects of a product include:
the device should be constructed and designed in a manner that allows repairs to be made easily; end users and independent repair providers should be able to access original spare parts and necessary tools (software as well as physical tools) at fair market conditions; repairs should, by design, be possible and not be hindered by software programming; and the repairability of a device should be clearly communicated by the manufacturer.
Some goals of the right to repair are to favor repair instead of replacement, and make such repairs more affordable leading to a more sustainable economy and reduction in electronic waste.
Repair-friendly design
The use of glue or proprietary screws can make repairs more difficult. In general, proprietary parts and accessories can make products more difficult to repair, such as Apple's "Lightning" charging ports and adapters, which require a non-standard process to repair, leading the European Union to standardize charging ports for small devices, requiring all devices to use USB-C.
Accessible spare parts and tools Parts and tools needed to make repairs, should be available to everyone, including consumers.
Software Parts pairing or Serialization prevents parts being swapped without a password that the manufacturers provide to preferred technicians. This and other new ways to lock devices, including digital rights management, have become increasingly popular among manufacturers. Using approved parts can increase the cost of the repair, leading many consumers to speed up their upgrade cycle to a new device.
In addition to access to software updates, the ability to install third-party software is also mentioned as a major goal, which would, for example, allow some devices to be adapted over time.
Transparency Manuals and design schematics should be freely available and help consumers know how to repair their devices. +Example of a law addressing different aspects of repairabilityAspect of repairabilityScopeJurisdictionRepairability scorecardsFranceStandardized partsUSB-CEuropean UnionParts pairingOregonThird-party software allowedSoftware update supportSell spare partsTools needed to make repairs can be found easilyManuals and design schematic freely available
History
The strategy to continuously change products to create continuous demand for the latest generation was pursued at a large scale by General Motors executive Alfred P. Sloan. GM overtook Ford as the biggest American automaker and planned obsolescence with annual variants of a product became widely adopted across industries in the American economy, eventually becoming adopted by Ford by 1933.
The car industry was at the forefront of establishing the concept of certified repair: starting from the 1910s, Ford established certified dealerships and service networks to promote parts made by Ford instead of independent repair shops and often after-sales parts. Ford also pushed for standardized pricing among certified repair shops, making flat fees mandatory even for different repairs. The combination of annual updates to cars and components made it more difficult for independent repair shops to maintain a stock of parts.
A couple of court cases have required products with repaired or refurbished components to be labeled as "used."
In 1947, a business owner was refurbishing old spark plugs and reselling them. However, he was reselling them under a trademarked name. This led to a lawsuit that provided the framework for legislation that would provide a right to resell repaired or refurbished items, as long as they were labelled correctly.
Champion Spark Plug Co. v. Sanders provided the basis of FTC guidelines which provide an uninfringeable right to resell repaired or refurbished items as long as they were labeled as such. The decision also provided the framework for trademark guidelines regarding the resale of used goods under a trademarked namesake.
FTC guidelines Title 16, Chapter I, Subchapter B, Part 20 provides guidance and regulations on the labeling of items that have been "rebuilt", "refurbished", or "re-manufactured" in order to prevent unfair competitive advantage in selling components in the automobile industry. This guideline hence allowed businesses the ability to repair items, for resale later.
Some manufacturers shifted towards more repairable designs. Apple, which rose quickly to become one of the largest computer manufacturers, sold the first computers with circuit board descriptions, easy-to-swap components, and clear repair instructions, but has since developed a reputation for imposing strict repair restrictions on its products.
Copyright with regard to computer software source code also became a front on the limitation of repairability. In the U.S., the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 prohibits repairs unless granted an exception, and has been used to block repairs as software became more common in a range of devices and appliances.
To prevent refilling of empty ink cartridges, manufacturers had started placing microchips counting fill levels and usage, rendering refills difficult or impossible. Reselling and refurbishing products was confirmed to be legal by the Supreme Court in 2017 in Impression Prods., Inc. v. Lexmark Int'l, Inc.. As of 2022, complaints about the longevity and repairability of printers remains. In the early 2000s, the automotive industry defeated the first proposal of a right to repair bill for the automotive sector. While the National Automotive Service Task Force (NASTF), an organization supported by the automotive industry, established an online directory for accessing manufacturer information and tools in 2001, a study conducted by the Terrance Group found that around 59% of independent repair services continued to struggle to get access to diagnostic tools and parts from manufacturers. The share of electronic components in the total bill of materials for a car also rose from 5% in the 1970s to over 22% in 2000. The increasing hybridization of cars brought the need of special tools that a manufacturer only shared with authorized repair services.
A trend towards right to repair in automotive and other industries gained traction with more proposed laws and court decisions. While initially driven by automotive consumers protection agencies and the automotive after-sales service industry, the discussion of establishing a right to repair for any kind of industrially produced device gained traction as consumer electronics such as smartphones and computers became widely used, alongside advanced computerized integration in farming equipment. The movement was also backed by climate change activists aiming to reduce e-waste.