A right to repair: Why Nebraska farmers are taking on John Deere and Apple (opens in new tab)

Also, car manufacturers are currently required to make replacement parts available for some period of time -- something like ten years after each model year. So no, not a stretch at all.

Aren't there some jurisdictions that already legally require car manufacturers to disclose their repair manuals, to facilitate 3rd party repair?

I believe Tesla games this by charging ridiculous amounts for short-term online repair manual subscriptions, but most manufacturers just sell copies of the manuals. I think access to that information is a good idea, so Tesla should be swatted down.

I agree with the sentiment, but they may be doing JIT production and literally only have parts to build however many units they build for a day.

Allowing third parties to make the parts is the way to go.

when i commented j was thinking more along the lines of Apple and electronics that were manufactured to be more disposable and less fixable. It might be cost prohibitive to sell OEM parts for macbooks or might interfere with product design.

When considering cars or large tractors, it's not as valid of a consideration, because they might sell an entire "computer unit" as a part vs the RAM to upgrade it. maybe?

At the same time, making things repairable definitely hurts the environment in some way too.

I'm looking around my office - there's about 300 workstations, all of them have a gigantic metal case, the motherboard has several PCIEx slots that will never be used, several SATA connectors, metal clips for the CPU mounts, tons of power cabling just hanging around doing nothing because it has no devices connected to it. All of those PCs will be fully replaced for newer models in about 3 years, and all of this effort to make them repairable and modifiable will be for naught. If we could buy a small system that had everything integrated on the motherboard and required one cable for power, would that not be better for the environment? All the plastic to make superfluous connectors in my machine is literally a giant waste of resources and we could have done without it.

But that doesn't mean the farmers shoudln't be able to work on the system itself if it is broken, using readouts from the system as a guide to fixing it. This might mean, however, that instead of being able to fix the software itself, they have to buy a new drive, exchanging in the old one in the process. This small bit is a reasonable request because folks can be highly motivated to cheat otherwise.

The EPA can say "tamper resistant," but I call it "repair resistant".

I object to the word "tamper" because implies that even though I am the owner of the car I somehow require authorization to work on it.

I've never heard of an individual being fined for removing/disabling emissions equipment, only businesses. Have you?

Given the "coal rolling" trucks, those big fines still have yet to hit their target?

There are all sorts of examples of closed and anti-competitive and collusive markets. So no, it is false to say "if enough people care...the market would follow". That doesn't always happen, there have to be many buyers and sellers first off, and we don't have a competitive market in smart phone software or hardware at all.

I'd also argue culture has made owning a mobile device a function of being socially acceptable. It's more weird today to go to a bar and say, "yeah I left my phone at home on purpose" than to say "yeah I'm an atheist" 20 years ago. So it's quite nearly socially unacceptable to not have a mobile phone.

Understand that the U.S. is a liberal democracy, a constitutional democracy, and its constitution prescribes quite a number of things including the power of the people to define an economic system and the means to regulate it. Market failures are why we get legislated alternatives. You can dislike it all you want, but some fairy tale notion of either capitalism or free markets is not a requirement of this government's founding documents.

A few counterarguments:

1. When their demands are not heard, people use the law instead, i.e. "If you want to do business on our land, you have to play by our rules."

2. "if enough people care that's where the market would follow" - there are so many counterexamples to this I have no idea how you were able to type the words. The 'market' (corporations) will use the substantial information asymmetry and its organizational advantage to steer things in the direction most profitable to it. The way to fight this is through collective action, not by leaving individual consumers to somehow outplay a giant corporation.

3. Patents and copyrights are granted to 'promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts'. Their malicious use, such as restricting the distribution of repair manuals, and preventing the manufacture of replacement parts, could well be grounds for losing them. Demanding they instead be made available for purchase seems like a very reasonable alternative.

First revoke all corporations, no limited liability if you want to make consumers fight it out in the market.

Depends on the industry. The auto insurance industry had facilitated this, but was then reprimanded for using generic parts to repair damaged cars. There was some irony in that US parts manufacturers claimed 3rd parties were importing "foreign" parts, but many of the US manufactures also subcontracted overseas. Thorny issue.

Of course. People do that already. If you can reverse engineer it (or get it close), isn't that okay?

I don't think anyone would condone a manufacturer like Foxcon ln selling parts independently, but that stuff is handled contractually anyways.

I assume the poster is not referring to remote wipe, but the fact that it is literally impossible to crack into an iPhone associated to an Apple account you can't authenticate. If an iDevice is iCloud locked and you don't have that password, it's a brick.