The EU completely misunderstood what right to repair is and is now implementing something so that they can say that they have "right to repair". This will damage the RTR movement even further. I wonder who lobbied for this.
Exactly. This looks like the EU appeasing their paymasters while fooling their constituents with PR.
It seems to be a very effective strategy to coin a phrase, make people believe it's one thing, even gaslight them over their concerns, then turn it in to another in the implementation
The problem of the European Union is that it is founded not on the concepts of a federation or union states. And finally merging into one nation.
The European Union is building up on the „
Montanunion (long version: European Coal and Steel Community) and that is the rational why they care mostly about economy and still believe in free-trade[1].
This causes friction between young people which want one entity of state and that cares about the people’s needs. The old just want subventions from the EU and that the economy flows easily.
The focus on free-trade is obsolete nowadays. There is no free-trade anywhere and no fair capitalism (the greed thing which harms our planet). Example:
We had weird moments during COVID where we had to ask „if it is fair“ to rescue an otherwise healthy an needed airline? The question should have been if it is needed and sustainable. Of course it was!
Where doing similar debates over machine equipment, chip factories, train factories…and the EU says „We can’t merge them because that would be unfair“. To whom? China? India? The US? Who cares. Free-trade is an idiotic concept by capitalists. The priority of every state should be the needs of the peoples.
Anyway. This is some improvement for the people in Europe :)
But how to solve the core issue? I complained a lot.
I think we need a core europe with the states which are willing to unite in long term (likely France, Germany, Benelux, Czech, Spain, Portugal, Poland - that is not an exclusion list). The desires of the population, social system and economy should be similar. So if the people in Slovakia or Hungary change their mind…welcome aboard.
[1] Weird for Americans. Since Reagan the economy (and especially the IT) is unregulated and shall dominate everything. China doesn’t care about free-trade at all, they will come with a list of requirements for an enterprise to build a company in China and transfer knowledge. The adapt the knowledge and kill your industry with state money and initially cheap products. Now your depend their industry. Partnership is something different?
Why is there gatekeeping of "professional" repairers and "repair services"? Why can't I as a consumer view a service manual and buy a part? If a washing machine costs £220, and a professional repair man costs £70 per hour, nobody will repair out of warranty.
Because it is these professional repairers lobbying for the laws.
This sort of thing always aims to get the law to identify some kind of professional certification needed to qualify, and then that certification gets more expensive and limited (eg. by saying studying a specific course is needed, but only X thousand places are offered per year).
Eventually, people who have done that course and qualification get so expensive that that becomes their only job, and you won't find a handyman-type person qualified to do those tasks.
It'd be quite ironic if a "right to repair" would have provisions designed to prevent people from repairing their own electronics, because a business interest lobbied for that.
(Contemplate an "open-source" license where the source is provided upon request, to government-licensed software professionals, and otherwise unavailable. We'd be living in this world if history went only very slightly differently. You can't invent that (FOSS) kind of radical sociology after the regulators catch up to you—let alone expect regulators to invent it for you).
Saying Louis Rossmann is fighting for the right to repair while trying to keep individuals from repairing their own devices is like saying Linus Torvalds created Linux to keep people from getting the idea to build their own operating system.
Rossmann is fighting the good fight and also often doing videos showing how a repair actually works.
Most famously a video where he showed that a certain type of common Macbook screen repair is just a simple bent pin that he even repaired for free while the official Apple repair would have cost hundreds of dollars
The stuff that Rossmann repairs are "simple" because he has the tools and expertise to do so. It's very much a "$1 for the screw and $999 to know where to put it" type of situation.
Does everyone realistically expect Apple to have a Rossmann-level repair person[0] in every one of their 528 Apple Stores to do these "simple fixes" with professional gear.
Or is it actually more economical for them to build the equipment for swapping whole boards so simply that anyone with 30 minutes of training can do it. (This is the gear they rent to you when you want to self-repair btw)
[0] 3+ more likely so that they can have vacations and sick days too
Most companies do a simple board swap for the customer, but then send the faulty boards back to the factory to be 'refurbished' - ie. run through the automated test rig and check every function is fully working.
By doing that, an unnecessary board swap is 'free' to the manufacturer - which makes diagnosing problems in the store far easier - just keep swapping parts till the issue is resolved.
When those boards end up back at the factory, they'll pass the test immediately and be able to be sent right out again for another repair.
For boards that don't pass the test, sort them by the failure symptoms and suddenly repair becomes far easier - "these 50 need a new power supply IC, pay someone $25/hour on the rework station to do that, costing $3/board labour and $3/board in components".
I didn't argue that to shame on Apple.
I can understand why that is done ( especially with warranty extensions )
What I am arguing is that there may be a much cheaper ("easier" for the person who knows what to do) way to repair it if you don't care about the warranty but that path can currently be blocked by the manufacturer.
For example: We had a deadline for submitting our final game build last year and my laptop where I had everything setup died a day before the deadline. I went to a local electronics shop, bought a different laptop, removed the SSD from the broken one put it in the new one and was backup and running 30 minutes after returning home.
I would not have cared about warranty there, only about the speed of getting back up and running to meet the deadline.
Yes, he’s a really nice guy and likable and I enjoy his videos too.
But you cannot ignore the fact that he’s highly financially incentivized to hold the positions he does, given he both owns a repair shop and probably makes even more money talking about repairing things on YouTube.
They're not just videos "about repairing". He's teaching people about defects, finding them, and how to repair them. He's selling tools used for repairs, even though someone can start a competing business. It's like you're being sceptical of teachers because they're getting paid.
Why do you think he set up repair.wiki? It's a free resource he started to provide diagnostic and repair guides for a wide range of electronics. He's very transparent about wanting people to be able to repair their own devices and his actions clearly back that up.
These are not the actions of someone being protective of their skills to make more money imo.
> If a washing machine costs £220, and a professional repair man costs £70 per hour, nobody will repair out of warranty.
This is because repair doesn't scale with automation the way manufacturing does. Repair is likely to cost far more, unless you do it yourself, and then it costs you time.
It feels like manufacturers are steering the economy away from consumers "owning" products outright to a model where we consume them through subscriptions or financing arrangements. In this new model, consumers notionally own the product but pay a subscription for repairs. What are the upsides of this shift? Products become more accessible, as the upfront cost is reduced and spread over a longer period. Products last longer because the vendor has an obligation to maintain them for much longer. This is better for the environment; in a world of finite resources, we want our products to last longer.
However, there are considerable downsides. The very notion of ownership is being challenged. Restrictions placed on owners regarding what they can do with their products can limit personalisation, modification, or even resale, thereby reducing the true sense of ownership. While more money circulating in the economy benefits everyone, allowing us to grow while consuming fewer resources, the wealthier members of society will still be able to afford more upfront and get better products. They are likely to be rewarded with lower subscription costs or higher-quality products.
Consider Sam Vimes' "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, which illustrates this point perfectly.[0]
Luckily we have https://elektrotanya.com. All it takes is a little civil disobedience and a few professional repair man to make all those manuals available to everyone in true hacker spirit.
> Why can't I as a consumer view a service manual and buy a part?
Have you ever helped a family member with their computer problems, only to notice that they often start as something benign, and the mess you are dealing with is from the family member attempting to fix that benign problem themselves?
Outside of tech, how many people do you know who actually read manuals instead of just going at it?
> Have you ever helped a family member with their computer problems, only to notice that they often start as something benign, and the mess you are dealing with is from the family member attempting to fix that benign problem themselves?
No, not really. Why do you think this story is relevant here?
I do read manuals. They are usually badly written and often times very hard to understand because of that. Like using terms they don't explain, having multiple interpretations and even referencing buttons that font exists.
For that matter, if documentation to windows or whatever was less incomprehensible, the random people trying to fix computer would had better chance.
I believe this is done partially to dissuade bad actors from gaining easy unverifiable access to hardware and software thus rendering anti theft technology ineffective. If you mandate all repairs to be done using a verifiable (and paid for) repair key which you supply to vetted people, it becomes that much harder to replace the anti theft module as a common thief. Even large scale operations would then be harder to run as they would require a fence of sorts to use as a repairman. Of course that fence would then risk their credentials and so on...
This is very naive view. Anyone that handles stolen goods will have a fence "repairman" (just like they have car breakdown places - in EU only certified establishments can breakdown cars). All it will accomplish is make repair harder not easier while at the same time showing "hey look, we have right to repair".
This is straight out of Lenin's book. How do you do whatever the f** you want when in power? You first redefine language. Then you can do anything. The EU has been at it for quite a while. First we've lost the UK because of this stupid bullshit. Now, the majority of the young population in the western countries like Belgium/Netherlands etc is already majority against the EU. It's only a matter of time it will fall apart. Russian/Middle Eastern corruption and pure homegrown stupidity. This is what is killing the EU right now.
I suspect it's a compromise after pressure from both manufacturers and repair services; manufacturers so that repairs are gatekept, and the cost of repair remains relatively high (because the manufacturers control the supply and cost of replacement parts and tooling, e.g. with Apple providing certified repair places with tools (wasn't that on a lease / rental basis?)); if repair costs remain high because you have to pay someone else to do it, people will consider buying a replacement instead of keeping their devices.
Because not everything can be build to not be dangerous. The potential of electrocution, poisoning from a battery are all real. Not real for you because you're probably smart but you have to think about people who have no idea what they're doing and could get themselves gurt
This is anti-right to repair rhetoric; the potential of electrocution is similarly high when fixing your car or doing your home electrical.
Everyone should be able to fix their own things, AND have the choice to leave it to a professional. Only a few things are legally required to be done by professionals, things like asbestos removal.
So what? Do all the knifes in the supermarket have rounded tips? What if someone stabs themselves with a knife with a sharp tip? Shouldn't we all give up normal knives to protect that one idiot that stabs himself? This is completely silly. No, the state is not your nanny to protect you from yourself.
Things use to come with schematics including devices like Crt TVs that had many thousands of volts with a potential to kill a person instantly.
This whole "omg, the potential of poisoning from a battery or electrocution" (how is it any different if you buy that same battery without the device - perhaps we should ban sales of parts too) is a convenient excuse for manufacturers to make things to be disposable. It has the opposite effect, because the useless device will be thrown into trash and then it will become E-waste with a far bigger potential for poisoning water in some third world country than it ever had by being opened by an "unqualified" person.
There are websites that sell many parts for many appliances (espares.co.uk in the UK, for instance, and they also have many user manuals). I already replaced the handle of an old fridge and the seal of a washing machine that way. Even replaced the toner driver of a laser printer once.
The reality is that this "right to repair" is nothing but political fluff and brings very little or might even make appliances more expensive for consumers.
> If a washing machine costs £220, and a professional repair man costs £70 per hour, nobody will repair out of warranty.
Exactly and there is nothing that can be done about that. Most people aren't going to take their washing machine, or what not, apart by themselves even if parts and manuals are available, which they already are. Hence my previous point.
If your skills become common and accessible (YouTube) and the way to keep them profitable is through regulation, then something is wrong, wouldn’t you say?
We had many examples in history of gatekeeping a skill, most recently with taxi drivers.
Can you imagine similar restrictions imposed on software engineering jobs, say to require a computer science diploma? Not hard to imagine that in 10 years anyone with half a brain and ChatGPT and YouTube will be able to write general purpose, “does the job, good enough” software.
We could value work more independently of its contribution to enrich an employer/board/funder (lots of important work is done through volunteering) and build a sufficient social net that unemployment isn't a problem. With all the productivity gains we made over the last few decades, we could possibly even have no unemployment, if everyone was employed fewer days per week at a full time salary. But we don't want to share the added value we're producing with everyone, do we? We make the choice to prioritize shareholder revenue growth over avoiding catastrophic unemployment.
Has it become catastrophic in the 200 years since the industrial revolution threatened this would be the case, while the world population went up eightfold?
Did the industrial revolution happen over an extremely compressed timeframe and feature machines that can assemble machines based on labor output data?
Yeah, hate that. We also have all kinds of subsidies for insulating your house etc. I insulated my house. Only I did it myself and you’re supposed to let a professional do it. A professional that just charges you his usual fee + the subsidy. They are really helpful in filing the paper work for the subsidy (which is substantial) for just a small extra fee.
This is only phase one; the citizens of Europe must now petition their own countries to implement great "Right to Repair" laws.
Important economic fact: If only one single European country (with sufficient population) implements a rather strict right to repair law, then likely all manufacturers in all countries will need to adhere to it, since tech companies don't like to have to build multiple product variants (per country), but much rather just have a single "EU" product that gets sold into the 300 million head European single market.
So this country-level lobbying in the next phase is really important and can be a game change for the environment.
I saw a similar thing happen with ROHS and WEE. I was working for a hardware manufacturer when ROHS was implemented in the EU and we suddenly had to change all of our hardware to be ROHS compliant.
Because why maintain two manufacturing lines? Either we stop selling in the EU or we make all of our hardware ROHS compliant.
I suspect it really matters how big the market is that implements the regulation. The finance people come in and ask; Is it better to ignore this market or change our supply chain?
More like 450 million, much bigger market than US for example. Plus even non-members cca adhere to most rules, sometimes make them much tougher (ie Switzerland). Britain may be soon an exception, ie US food lobby right to government got very strong right after Brexit, I guess HFCS or GMOs needs more markets to sell.
Not all of it it as rich as average US, but overall manufacturers can't ignore us.
Companies like to pretend like that's one possible outcome, but realistically that's never gonna happen. Can you imagine what a field day Samsung would have if Apple suddenly announced they're not gonna sell phones to Germany or w/e anymore?
But I absolutely can imagine them not re-working their entire product line for any of the smaller countries (baltics, balkans, Nordics, Eastern Europe, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, etc).
And for hardware startups? Forget about it. It’s already a nightmare to sell physical products throughout Europe given the intra-country shipping costs, multi-lingual requirements, and patchwork of localized distribution partners. You can expand to Europe once you’re big enough to deal with all the localization/regulation.
It’s funny, HN used to be a community of startup founders but nowadays you’ll see near-zero thought given toward startups in any discussions on HN. This is now a community of big tech worker bees who are hostile toward big tech companies, but who ironically support legal movements that entrench big tech.
And that isn't just some remote possibility, it's a likely outcome, because it's already a crapshoot with hardware/service availability across Europe. It was the case that for many years - might still be? - you couldn't buy Pixel phones in the Netherlands, which is how I ended up with a secondhand Verizon unit with a locked bootloader. In Switzerland, Digitec/Galaxus grey-markets many products which are otherwise not offered there. Last I checked, you still can't buy a Steam Deck in Switzerland. And none of that is because of additional pressure from onerous laws.
Switzerland is not in the EU. It is not part of the common market. They can not cut out Baltics, Netherlands, Sweden or any other members of the single market if they want to sell in any of the EU countries. That is the strength of the EU.
I'm sorry to disagree so bluntly, but: you are incorrect; they did, and they still do cut whole subregions out.
Example:
Google has a Google (web)Store in 17 European countries [1] (including the UK and Switzerland), thus 15 of 27 EU countries, and that number does not include the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania.
You can buy a Pixel in NL today, but you couldn't in 2019, even though Google had a web store there, because they didn't offer the product line in NL. I don't live in NL anymore, so I can't tell you what still isn't available there, but manufacturers refusing to bother with minority countries or languages (Dutch: "only" 24 million speakers in Europe) is and will continue to be a factor that prevents products from being localized and therefore offered in certain markets, European single market or not. Estonia has a population of ~1.3 million, so I can't imagine it's at the top of Google's priority list.
They said that websites would stop operating in Europe if GDPR got through and guess what, instead they built privacy teams to be compliant and applied the stricter privacy rules more globally. It's all empty threats.
I think monopoly laws should be used to combat this problem instead.
"Repair of apple devices" is a market with many participants, including apple itself. If Apple uses its power in the "design and manufacture of apple devices" market to unfairly influence its position in the "repair of apple products" market, then that should be illegal and they should be fined for it.
An example would be software locking serial numbers of parts together and requiring a special in-house-only piece of software to replace parts.
By the way, software locking serial numbers of all the internal components was purportedly done for anti-theft reasons.
If you can't swap the screen or battery from a stolen phone to another phone, then there is much less reason to steal phones.
Buuut, another approach would be for Apple to simply pop up a dialogue whenever parts are swapped saying "New Part Detected. Some parts of this phone are registered with another icloud account 'mary21@icloud.com'. Please log into that account now to prove ownership of those parts.".
The fact Apple didn't allow that is a pretty strong indicator that they wanted to have full control of the repair market.
I find it fascinating how smart Apple spins all these issues into something that's "good for consumers". Sometimes those reasons are built in, like with this case of serial numbers.
But also "privacy" or "security". Like with iMessage, where they cannot open it up to other platforms or clients, without hampering their security model. Or app store reviews, in place to "protect consumers from harmful apps" but very useful for Apple to tightly hold the monopoly of what you may install.
Fascinating to witness a company using spin doctoring to protect their moat.
Edit: to be extra clear: I think all these cases are therefore net harmful to customers. As, in several cases, the EU or other regulators confirm by forcing Apple to change the model.
Does this bill includes an obligation for manufacturers to sell spare parts at a reasonable price ? Or has clauses against malicious compliance like apple did with the infamous military crates ?
The "Military Crates" (100% off the shelf Pelican cases used to transport fragile equipment across the world) contain very specific gear that's simple enough for anyone to use as long as they follow the instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdYzVaC6HSQ
It's not like you can reliably tell someone to "just use your hair dryer to loosen the adhesive" and not expect huge amounts of breakage.
The devices in the kit apply exactly the correct amount of heat and pressure and are actually the same setup they use themselves.
Thanks for the clarification, I didn't have the correct name for those. Still, they should design their devices to not require factory tools to be used by the average joe just to replace a part.
Please list here the devices you would let an Average Joe repair with off-the-shelf tools, preferably things with electronics. Most Joes can swap a broken handle to a broom.
Apple should just sell those crates to anyone for a reasonable markup. Then those people can provide repair services to others independent of any oversight of Apple.
Even if not, it's still possible to break up other devices to scavenge parts to resell, as long as the manufacturer doesn't software lock the parts together.
As far as I can tell, this directive mainly mandates that producers offer to repair certain categories of products, for a price or for free and that independent professional repair shops/services can access tools, parts and information needed to do so.
> Producers shall ensure that >independent [professional] repairers< have access to spare parts and
repair-related information and tools (From Art. 5)
Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing here granting the right or feasibility of repairing things yourself.
If I understand the directive correctly, producers can void all of this in a EULA. I may be wrong.
Are you sure about that? The core rule is usually that contracts are binding. In some cases they are void if exceptionally unreasonable.
> While this proposal regulates certain business practices concerning repair in view of the
sustainable consumption objective, >it safeguards contractual freedom< and is conducive to the
freedom to conduct business (Article 16 of the Charter). The provisions under this proposal
aim at boosting the repair market without creating a burden, in particular for small and
medium-sized enterprises.
Well, since EULAs are straight-up invalid in Sweden, obviously it can't be done in an EULA. If it were allowed it have be part of an agreement with the company that is done before the sale, and which is an actual proper contract.
Article 16 says only:
Article 5(1) and (2) and Article 6 of this Directive shall not apply to contracts for the provision of repair services concluded before [24 months after the entry into force].
2. Article 12 of this Directive shall not apply to sales contracts concluded before [24 months after the entry into force]
So while the wording you mention, it seems to only provide a transitional provision before people get used to the law.
When I say EULA, I here mean additional license term for something that are 'agreed' to after the purchase.
I haven't heard of any agreements being permitted to bypass the konsumentköplag. That is, when dealing with consumers you can't get around the requirements to repair broken products etc., but entering into agreements with the consumer to that end.
These new repair things will probably be in implemented within existing consumer protection frameworks, and the whole point of these things is that you can't push complicated legal agreements on people.
I am not a lawyer, and definitely not a EU law lawyer, but e.g. in the copyright law, it states that the right to dynamically reverse engineer a program can not be given up through agreement. I would presume that the above sentence about contractual freedom combined with that implies that you can give up the right to have something repaired through an agreement.
You have the right to repair what you own. This is aimed at preventing companies from preventing you from doing so.
Parts are already available in many cases and no-one prevents you from sourcing them.
But in reality most people don't do that and don't want to do that. Either they call a repairman or they buy a new appliance, and this law won't change any of that.
1. Everyone has the right to own, use, dispose of and bequeath his or her lawfully acquired possessions. No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss. The use of property may be regulated by law in so far as is necessary for the general interest.
You can do whatever you want with your propery, this is a fundamental and established right of private property.
> This is aimed at preventing companies from preventing professional repair services from doing so.
If repairmen are able to repair, you can, too. It is already by and large possible for many appliances. I have done it many times, there are websites where you can order many parts and even manuals (e.g. espares.co.uk in the UK).
The issue is one of competence and will to do it. It's utopian to think that most people want to repair their own appliances or are able to.
It's like for cars. In the (not so) 'olden' days you could buy detailed manuals and parts where available, including from junkyards. Cars were purely mechanical. And yet the vast majority of people were not touching them beyond checking the oil level...
We have a right to repair and always had, as said.
Individuals have access in the same way as repairmen. It's already possible to source parts for most appliances as an individual. This should make it easier. Indeed, what is the difference between a consumer and a "professional repairman"? None apart from the fact that the latter is expected to have some competency and knowledge on how to get parts (which traditionally means a nondescript supplier in the local industrial area, which you're free to go to as well, there are also websites these days), but there is no magic licence that gives access to secret, restricted warehouses.
But the key is that Joe Public is not interested. If something breaks down they call a repairman or buy new. It's unrealistic or utopian to believe that people are interested. It's worded as targetting professionals because it is (somewhat) realistic and, I'm guessing, aimed at using the existing suppliers, not forcing availablity of parts in supermarkets.
> We have a right to repair and always had, as said.
You don't have a right to repair if you can't access the required docs, tools, spare parts or if there are unreasonable conditions if you do so. I know a lot of John Deere customers who don't agree with you, for starters. This is why "right to repair" is a thing at all.
> Indeed, what is the difference between a consumer and a "professional repairman"?
First, "professional repairman" is someone who offers repair as a service to others, who has it as their trade. You'd think the distinction would be easy to make. It is defined in one of the first articles of the directive.
Second, that you are not guaranteed access to documentation, spare parts and so on as a consumer.
Based on the fact that you own that thing and you can do whatever you want with it.
The issue until now has been the availability of documentation (schematics, instructions, etc.). For example, in USA you can purchase Volvo service manual access as individual, but in EU it is not available at all.
Having a "right" to repair something doesn't really mean much if the vendors can legally keep documentation and spare parts from you, does it? The point is that this law does not give you any more rights on that matter, it only grants those rights to professionals.
Furthermore, "you can do what you want with it" is misleading if doing what you want with it (e.g. repairing it) will have unreasonable consequences such as unfairly void warranties and so on.
> Furthermore, "you can do what you want with it" is misleading if doing what you want with it (e.g. repairing it) will have unreasonable consequences such as unfairly void warranties and so on.
Not it's not misleading. If it's under warranty it means they'll repair it for free. But equally it's quite reasonable for them to refuse (i.e. warranty is void) is you have fiddled with the device. A warranty is only a consumer protection against defects. That has nothing to do with your right to do anything you want with your property.
I get two equally sized buttons on desktop, "I accept cookies" and "I refuse cookies". But it's an official EU page after all, would a be pretty bad show if they had one of those dark-pattern cookie banners where "Accept" is a single click but refusing requires to go through pages and pages of checkboxes ;)
I don't think it's a good implementation. Takes up lots of space of the screen.
Also:
"With your permission, we will use AT internet and Hotjar cookies to produce aggregated, anonymous data about our visitors' browsing and behaviour on our website."
They could use something like plausible and that won't even need any cookie notices.
It’s another nail in the coffin of consumer hardware startups. In addition to CE and waste issues now comes a requirement for repairability. Only the big guys with departments of clerks can launch a product nowadays.
The Framework laptop seems to be a counter example to your theory, the company seems to be just under 50 people which isn't all that big even for a startup, and repairability is one of their main selling points.
May I ask you what this company has to do with EU? If you could open the website you would find this information:
Company: Framework Computer Inc
Headquarters
Address: 447 Sutter St, PMB 135, San Francisco, CA, 94108-4618, United States
If they want to sell their products in the EU it doesn't matter where they are based. And Framework is in a very good position to do so since they designed their products with repairability in mind from the start, and all that without a "big department of clerks".
The requirement comes because you have to go out of your normal flow to make things not repairable.
Can you tell me one example on how this would make the life harder for startups? The mandate is to produce schematics which the startup obviusly would have and to make parts available. both things that any startup would need to consider as their part of the warranty/repair anayway but now they have to make this availble for third parties and not just themselves.
But repairing things can be a way to learn to build them, and usually happens closer to the end consumer, so I think if there is any burden imposed by this that could delay things, this other part is more than enough to compensate.
- I can repair it myself
- with free access to schematics
- with access to spare parts
- without coupling between hardware and software
The EU completely misunderstood what right to repair is and is now implementing something so that they can say that they have "right to repair". This will damage the RTR movement even further. I wonder who lobbied for this.