New Jersey Becomes the 12th State to Consider Right to Repair Legislation

[lordvader88]

http://www.tathasta.com/2017/06/new-jersey-becomes-12th-state-to.html

Moriarty announced Friday that he's introducing the "Fair Repair Act," a bill that would require electronics manufacturers to sell replacement parts and tools to the general public and independent repair companies. It would also require them to make repair guides publicly available. Moriarty is more or less right about the general cadence to these legislative battles: Tech lobbying killed right to repair legislation in Nebraska and Minnesota, and records show that Apple, IBM, Verizon, and industry trade groups have heavily stepped up their lobbying spending in New York.

Good, and don't forget about learning some EE history, in case we all end up back in the dark ages and have to start with vacuum tubes again and making our own resistors and capacitors too

[james_s]

I'd like to see something of this nature at a federal level so it affects the whole country. Make schematics available, sell replacements for all custom/programmable parts or offer the firmware binary to program blank parts. If a product is deemed obsolete and support is dropped, release all the firmware binaries.

[GK]

I've been wondering if legislation along these lines is inevitable/will eventually be common place, not necessarily from a consumer rights perspective, but from an environmental one. The electronics industry has already been target by RoHS to limit hazardous substances going to landfill, so it would seem a natural progression to legislate in some form or another against excessive production of electronics goods destined to landfill by targeting what is effectively, in many respects, planned obsolescence.