Right to repair
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Right to repair is a legal right for owners of devices and equipment to freely modify and repair products such as automobiles, electronics, and farm equipment. Right to repair may also refer to the social movement of citizens putting pressure on their governments to enact laws protecting a right to repair.
There are several forces that result in interference with a right to repair, some intentional and some incidental. The Consumer Action Taskforce generally focuses on practices that are intentional. The motivations for interference in a right to repair are sometimes but not limited to direct financial benefit or market control.
Anti-repair practices
Practices by companies and organizations that result in interference with right to repair often have other stated goals than to interfere with repair, or argue the importance of that goal supercedes any repair considerations that may be interfered with. Common stated goals used in the examples of this wiki are for security, to make warranty possible, to indemnify, safety, compliance with other regulation, or quality control. Right to repair advocacy seeks to challenge the validity of the stated goals, both on its merit and on its truthfulness as the motivation for the practice, due to the resulting interference with a consumer's right to repair. These goals are argued to be a mask for other outcomes that are meant to benefit that organization in other ways, often for financial benefit by limiting access to repair resources that result in higher costs to the consumer and fewer choices in repair options.
Parts
A way that companies can make their products more complicated is by using specialized parts in different ways:
- An off the shelf part that has had a slight change that causes it to be its own unique part number
- A part that isn't used in any other device
- A specialty part with no function of its own other than codependency with another part that is necessary and could technically function without it.
In the case of a company making their own unique part number, this causes the part to be exclusively offered to the company that 'created' it and unavailable for 3rd-party repairs. This now makes the company the exclusive repairer of the device and they can charge whatever they want, or the device is unrepairable since the company doesn't repair that device and the part can't be readily sourced.
In the case of parts that aren't used in other devices, this can cause repair prices to shoot up, since there isn't an incentive for repair shops to have this part readily available. Using phones as an example, Phone A and Phone B are both from the same manufacturer, and are physically indistinguishable. However, on the inside Phone A uses a completely different screen connection than Phone B, and Phone B has a completely different battery shape than Phone A. The parts are no longer interchangeable between the phones, and more parts need to be stocked as a result. As well, the repair shop takes a risk on keeping a stock of parts that may or may not sell because they are exclusive to a certain phone. This can also lead to people not wanting to have their phone repaired, since they will be without their phone for a week or two while the shop waits for a part to ship.
Software
Some ways that companies can and (some) have been making software worse for consumers is among the following:
- Requiring a subscription for software which doesn't need constant updates or cloud content to function
- Introducing proprietary protocols or file types without any innovation or real addition of features (for instance, if a company introduces a word processor which doesn't have any more features than a standard .odt or .docx file, then there likely isn't a real reason for it to use its own proprietary format).
- Not providing troubleshooting or issue workaround information on reasonable terms (for instance, requiring an absurd amount of money and/or technical certificates for said information is beyond what would be reasonable)
- Making software needlessly dependent on cloud infrastructure
- Regressing features and usability for unnecessary reasons
These can interfere with daily lives and the ability of professionals to rectify any software issues. For instance, a company charging an absurd amount of money for information on the location of one checkbox in one of their settings dialog can lead to a professional spending an extra hour or two to locate the dialog and the specific checkbox.
Proprietary filetypes and protocols can make hardware useless if the company who made it closes their business without disclosing the software, protocol, or filetype to the public or surviving entity before doing so.