Right to repair is a legal right for owners of devices and equipment to freely maintain, repair, or modify products such as automobiles, electronics, and farm equipment. Common obstacles to repair include requirements to use only the manufacturer's maintenance services, restrictions on access to tools and components, and software barriers. These obstacles represent a repair monopoly, an aftermarket monopoly where a company controls the market for repairing and maintaining their products, making it difficult or even impossible for anyone to be able to fix them. This can take the form of making it challenging or prohibitively expensive for individuals or independent third parties to get access to parts, manuals, or diagnostic tools. The purpose of repair monopolies is to force customers to either use the manufacturer's own repair services or purchase new equipment from the manufacturer. Repair monopolies have been found to lead to higher prices, increased delays, reduced serviceability, and less choice for consumers. Proponents for the right to repair point to the benefits in affordability, sustainability, and availability of critical supplies in times of crisis. There is a social movement of citizens putting pressure on their governments to enact laws protecting a right to repair.
Impacts While initially driven mostly by automotive consumer protection agencies and the automotive after sales service industry, the discussion about establishing a right to repair, not only for vehicles but for any kind of electronic product, gained traction as consumer electronics such as smartphones and computers became universally available, causing broken and used electronics items to become the fastest growing waste stream. Today it is estimated that more than half of the population of the western world has one or more used or broken electronic devices at home that are not economically repairable. In addition to the consumer goods, healthcare equipment repair access made news at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when hospitals had trouble getting maintenance for some critical high-demand medical equipment, most notably ventilators. The pandemic has also been credited with helping to grow the right-to-repair movement since many repair shops were closed. The Economist also cites the expectation that owners of products should be able to repair them as a sense of moral justice or property rights. Those fighting against planned obsolescence have also taken note of when repair costs exceeds replacement costs because the companies that created the product have retained a monopoly on its repair, driving up prices.
Definition
Right to repair refers to the concept that end users of technical, electronic or automotive devices should be allowed to freely repair these products. Some notable aspects of a product include:
the device should be constructed and designed in a manner that allows repairs to be made easily; end users and independent repair providers should be able to access original spare parts and necessary tools (software as well as physical tools) at fair market conditions; repairs should, by design, be possible and not be hindered by software programming; and the repairability of a device should be clearly communicated by the manufacturer. Some goals of the right to repair are to favor repair instead of replacement, and make such repairs more affordable leading to a more sustainable economy and reduction in electronic waste.
Repair-friendly design
The use of glue or proprietary screws can make repairs more difficult. In general, proprietary parts and accessories can make products more difficult to repair, such as Apple's "Lightning" charging ports and adapters, which require a non-standard process to repair, leading the European Union to standardize charging ports for small devices, requiring all devices to use USB-C.
Accessible spare parts and tools Parts and tools needed to make repairs, should be available to everyone, including consumers.
Software Parts pairing or Serialization prevents parts being swapped without a password that they provide to preferred technicians. This and other new ways to lock devices, including digital rights management, have become increasingly popular among manufacturers. Using approved parts can increase the cost of the repair, leading many consumers to speed up their upgrade cycle to a new device. In addition to access to software updates, the ability to install third-party software is also mentioned as a major goal, which would, for example, allow some devices to be adapted over time.
Transparency Manuals and design schematics should be freely available and help consumers know how to repair their devices.
History
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