Consider This from NPR - A right to repair in Minnesota and beyond

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

The right to repair movement scored a big victory last week in Minnesota, where it got legislation signed into law that requires manufacturers to let independent shops and consumers buy the parts and tools necessary to repair their own equipment. The new law could make fixing your own devices, gadgets and appliances a lot easier in states across the country. NPR's Eric Deggans speaks with Gay Gordon-Byrne the executive director of the Repair Association, about the importance of the new law. And Minnesota State Rep. Peter Fischer talks about how he got involved in the movement and the obstacles he and others faced on the path to getting this law passed.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. I am definitely a repair enthusiast. That's how Wayne Seltzer sees himself. The same kind of magic that people find in poetry, art, or music, Seltzer sees it in a room full of people fixing lamps and lawnmowers. People who claim to have no knowledge of repairing things help somebody on the other side of the room because they say, oh, did you try removing that screw? Why do they know that? Because humans are amazing. They have incredibly good diagnostic and

intuitive senses, and they help each other. Seltzer runs the You Fix It Clinic in Boulder, Colorado. Every month or two, people bring in torn clothing, wobbly furniture, and malfunctioning gadgets and work with volunteers to get them working again. My wife actually kind of complains that I help other people fix their things in our house as a backlog of stuff. Recently, though, he was stumped by a repair job at home. A light started blinking on his dishwasher. So, open up the door, and, well, there's a half-washed load of dishes with a pool of dirty water. He looks at the manual and it says the blinking light might mean the door isn't firmly closed.

He tries that. No luck. And he said, if it doesn't work, call service. I said, oh, come on. What else does the blinking red light mean? You may have guessed that Wayne Seltzer is not the kind of guy who wants to call service. He asks Bosch if they'll show him the full service manual, not the slimmed down one for customers. That's a no-go. Service manuals aren't available to consumers only to authorized repair technicians, and you should contact one. So Wayne Seltzer keeps hunting. He turns up an unsanctioned copy of the service

manual online, and he flips to the part about the blinking red light. They said, if the door wasn't closed for me, instruct the consumer on how to close the door correctly. Okay. And then the golden stuff comes out. Use a fridge magnet to test the door sensor, it says. That's pretty cool. That doesn't seem like you need to be an authorized technician to put a magnet on your dishwasher. That works fine. So on to the next step. Sometimes the gasket that seals the door can move slightly out of position, which causes the door sensor to be slightly out of calibration. Simply push the gasket in with your fingers all around its length. And sure enough, that was the problem.

The fix that Bosch kept hidden in its service manual, a repair that it highly recommended customers like him not attempt, that repair was to run his finger along a little strip of rubber to push it back into place. Wayne Seltzer is part of a growing movement that wants to require companies to make it easier for all of us to fix the gadgets and appliances we own. It's called the right to repair. These microprocessor controlled things with lights and displays could tell you what's wrong, right? Why make this hard for me? Consider this. The right to repair movement won a big victory last week with the new law in Minnesota.

It could make fixing your own stuff a lot easier in states all across the country. Even if they don't know how, at least it will allow somebody to go into the business to help you fix things. That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's Wednesday, May 31st. It's Consider This from NPR. Peter Fisher represents the 48th District of Minnesota and was the state house sponsor of the Right to Repair law. He got involved with the Right to Repair movement 11 years ago when his constituents began calling his office with their frustrations. They were having trouble finding ways to get things repaired.

More importantly, I had a person who had also reached out to me who was a repair person who did repairs on computers and was finding it more and more challenging to be able to get the parts that he needed to repair people's computers, and he was struggling to stay afloat. Fisher had similar obstacles to getting his equipment fixed. I worked for a nonprofit serving youth who are homeless. And when we had laptops that would break, to get them repaired, I had to send them out of state, and it would be two or three weeks, two or three weeks at a minimum, before we get computers back.

And so in those kind of situations, we ended up having to buy more computers so that when one broke down, we'd have one on the side that we could give the other person so they could continue doing the work they had with you. Fisher calls this new legislation one of the most expansive bills in the country. It will require electronics manufacturers to let independent repair shops and consumers buy the parts and tools necessary to repair their own equipment. Fisher says getting this kind of legislation passed has not been easy. You've got extremely strong industries out there who see this as a threat against their profitability because right now they control the chain. So if you control the chain, you decide what parts get out there, what are the prices that are charged. You control it up and down. And as a result, you can make it so difficult that it's easier for people to

replace it. You make more money getting things replaced than providing parts out there. I think we see it differently. Tyler Dears doesn't think this is fair. He's the executive director for TechNet, a tech sector trade association that represents companies like Apple, Google, and Toyota. And Deere says a big concern for groups like his is unvetted third parties accessing sensitive equipment. There's an accountability link that is had when you do take it to an authorized repair provider. David Edmondson, TechNet's vice president of state policy and government relations, expanded on this concern. Our concerns are that the bills are going to mandate

that manufacturers provide unvetted third parties with sensitive diagnostic information, tools, and parts without requiring any of the critical consumer protections that are afforded by authorized repair networks like training and competency certification. Gay Gordon-Byrne doesn't see things that way. The thing is, you're the owner. You really are in control. She's the executive director of the Repair Association. Her consumer advocacy group has spent more than a decade pushing manufacturers to make it easier for people to fix their products. She spoke with NPR's Eric Deggans on why this legislation was so necessary and why its opponents are misguided.

Now, maybe you could explain for our listeners, why do you need to pass legislation to have this actually happen? I came from the perspective of large computers and you couldn't fix them anymore. Having been fixing them for 50 years, all of a sudden you turned around you couldn't fix them anymore. Having been fixing them for 50 years, all of a sudden you turned around and couldn't fix them. So we were like, well, what's illegal about this? And it turns out that there's lots of law that says it's legal to fix your stuff. The problem is there's no positive requirement that manufacturers have to help you fix your stuff. So that's where we started looking at legislation. We met with

members of Congress. We met with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and they basically said, we can't do that. That's not the way we work. You have to go legislative. And we were like deflated and horrified and, oh, damn, this is going to take forever. And at that time, literally in July of 2012, Massachusetts passed an automotive right to repair law, which did absolutely everything that we were trying to do for computers, but it said cars. So we said, ha, that's a template. We could follow that. And that's how we wound up in the legislative business. Wow. So what's the mechanism for how you actually secure this? What does the bill require companies to do to make sure that you're able to repair items that you want to repair rather than replace? There's really only a few things that you need to do to repair anything,

but it's more the case that you need all of these things to repair something with a chip, because you probably can't make a chip yet in your garage. There's no 3D printers that let you create products of those complexity. So you're stuck waiting on the manufacturer to sell you a part. And if they don't want to sell you the part, there's no requirement until now that they do that. So you get stuck pretty easily on very practical issues. So the bill says, the law says now, because there's two of them, that manufacturers that want to do business in either New York State or Minnesota, because there's two laws now, they have to provide fair and reasonable access to the same parts, tools, diagnostics, and software that they have been providing to their authorized

repair providers. So that Apple is an example. When you go into the Apple store, they say, we can fix that for you. And the requirement is that an independent repair shop can now do the same thing. So it's actually a very simple requirement. It's based on general business law because there's a couple of things that happen when you can't buy something. And most of that is deception, because you're supposed to be able to buy the things that, I mean, you owned it, you're supposed to be able to fix it. So it's a deceptive trade practice, it falls under general business law pretty easily. And it's also backed up by antitrust law, as we've been learning. So there's really good, solid legal foundation. And we didn't really want to have to do this.

It's very, very hard to get laws passed. You have no idea how hard it is. We started this 10 years ago, and here we are. Wow. 10 years of my life, and finally getting some finishing. Now, to be fair, we do have to point out that there are detractors to these efforts, groups like the Consumer Tech Association, that have said that this kind of legislation exposes a product's technical information to criminals.

It might pose a safety risk to consumers who don't have the technical know-how to safely handle certain kinds of electronics. What would you say to a company that would come to you with these concerns and say, legislation like this might not be the greatest idea? Well, we actually met with the CTA and a whole bunch of other groups. The problems that they can't explain is how they become responsible for your choices. They don't. It's your choice to decide if you want to fix it yourself.

It's your choice to decide if you think your nephew is adequately capable. It's your choice to call the manufacturer. And as much as these companies want to have control, they don't have it. They're not the owner. And when things fall apart really quickly on those objections, when it comes to that point, because how do you tell somebody that bought something, you are incompetent to fix it. You just don't have that option. It's the, it's the owner that decides, yeah, I'm incompetent. I shouldn't put my fingers in that socket. So yeah, yeah. I'm

incompetent to fix my car, for example, for sure. But, uh, some companies might say that, uh, requiring them to release certain information conflicts with a whole host of intellectual property laws and might reveal trade secrets. Are there any products that you think should not fall under a law like this, a right to repair law? I want to give you a very considered no. And the reason is, is that if the product is so sensitive that all of these, anything about how it gets repaired shouldn't be out in the wild, they shouldn't be sending it to their repair technicians either. So there's really no requirement that they sell you equipment. If they feel that strongly about it, they shouldn't sell it. They should rent it. And then they're the owner and they get to control it entirely. So again, the basic problem is one of ownership, not who's qualified or who is certified. If you own it, you have the responsibilities that the manufacturer gives up, and they swear that they give it up in their contracts.

There's all these indemnifications and limitations of liability in contracts that say, hey, you bought it. It's yours. We don't care if you fall off and die, lose a limb, lose profits, lose your crop. That's your problem. It's in every contract. So they don't really have the control they think they should have, but they don't have to sell things either. We also participated with Senators Grassley and Leahy did a study at the request of Congress about exactly these questions about intellectual property and repair, and they found there is no intersection.

It is legal to repair your stuff under copyright law. It is not a copyright law violation to back up the software on your computer, fix it, and restore the software. That's the only actual intersection. Now, it sounds like you might have sort of talked about this earlier in our conversation, but I'm wondering, is it worth asking whether this difficulty in repairing modern appliances and machines is intentional? I mean, are companies doing this on purpose in order to make you have to replace something rather than repair it? There's certainly that suspicion, probably a very realistic suspicion, but I think ultimately it comes down to the cost of manufacturing. It's much cheaper to manufacture things that are glued together than to have like

an easy disassembly. So some of the some of the intent was probably directed at making manufacturing cheaper because the cost of the product is has got to be competitive with the retail price. But along the way, it became the golden goose. And it became a way to monetize and create a recurring revenue stream that wouldn't otherwise exist. I mean, if you know that your phone's going to die every two years, and lo and behold, your phone dies every two years, it shouldn't die every two years, but it does. And we kind of came to accept that. Now we're rejecting it as a society.

I can see the expectations are changing. The people think, hey, you know, I don't have to throw this thing away. I don't have to go buy another one. I don't have to spend another thousand dollars on my kid's cell phone. Things like that. It's really changing. That was Gaye Gordon-Byrne of the Repair Association speaking with our colleague Eric Deggans. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Juana Summers. Thank you. theschmidt.org. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.