Not a simple fix

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 24th day of October, 2023.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. First up on The World and Everything in It: Mr. Fix-it.

In the age of YouTube, just about everyone is a Mr. or Ms. Fix-it. But not every technical product on the market has a manual and parts available for owners to make their own repairs.

EICHER: That’s where a movement called Right to Repair comes in… they’re lobbying for states to require companies to make it easier for customers and third-party players to repair their products.

Just a few weeks ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed one of these right-to-repair laws, making California the fifth state to pass this kind of legislation in the last decade.

BROWN: Are these laws really necessary, or could they have unexpected consequences for our economy? WORLD’s Mary Muncy brings us the story.

MARY MUNCY, REPORTER: Afton Darnell and her brother run a 60-acre farm in North Carolina. You might remember her from last week’s story on agriculture technology. Well, one big problem with some of that new tech is trying to fix it.

DARNELL: These sensors go out on these tractors, come to find out, it was an issue with a computer. And it became like, we couldn't even use this tractor that we're having to pay all this money for because you couldn't tolerate being on it because it would scream.

The Darnells like to fix things themselves. But since it was a problem with the computer, they needed someone from the tractor’s manufacturer, Deutz-Fahr, to come fix it.

DARNELL: It's under warranty but you still have to pay the service fee for them to come out.

And that takes precious time. And as the adage goes, time costs money too. If it had been their other, older tractor, they could have fixed it themselves.

DARNELL: We have to be careful about being able to get this stuff fixed. With these really fancy tractors you can't push start them. It's a different world with them. So that's why we're so scared of technology.

And it’s not just farmers that feel this way. People in all sorts of businesses across the country have found that they either don’t have the parts and manuals to fix something…or they can’t get into the computer without the manufacturer's code.

So far, California, New York, Minnesota, and Colorado have passed laws to address this problem. All modeled after a 2012 Massachusetts law.

LIZ CHAMBERLAIN: This was the first right to repair legislation in the world, as far as I know.

Liz Chamberlain is the director of sustainability at iFixit, a company that supplies guides for fixing just about everything from toasters to cell phones to tractors.

CHAMBERLAIN: The basic idea was that it would require manufacturers to provide parts, tools, documentation, to independent repair shops, and it would it would create this, you know, this level playing field.

But as technology gets more sophisticated, Chamberlain says parts and manuals aren’t enough, so she’s working on right-to-repair laws concerning software.

CHAMBERLAIN: Manufacturers will let you complete a repair in the sense of like, you can, you know, find a part and install it. But then in order to activate the part or, you know, order to make it work properly, make it function the way that you expect, it will, you have to complete some sort of software pairing process.

In most cases, it’s also against federal copyright law to break the locks on computers like the one in Darnell’s tractor. Manufacturers argue that it hurt could their business if people are able to access any source code behind the locks.

In 2021, the Library of Congress renewed an exception to break these locks in motorized land vehicles for the purposes of “diagnosis, repair, or modification.”

But they could remove that exception or change it when they review it again in 2024.

Alex Reinauer is a research fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He says most people would rather buy something new than fix something old, so requiring manufacturers to make their products fixable and provide parts will hurt innovation and the economy without helping consumers.

REINAUER: I think it's going to impose a lot of compliance costs on manufacturers, it's ultimately going to, to up the costs for all users and really only possibly only benefit a very small minority of users.

Reinauer is also concerned it could hurt the durability of products by forcing manufacturers to change the materials or techniques they use to make them.

But some people think both sides of the argument go too far.

Irene Calboli is a professor of law at Texas A&M University. She’s originally from Italy where there are right-to-repair laws. Calboli says that, unlike in Europe, there are currently grey areas in U.S. right-to-repair laws.

IRENE CALBOLI: If I'm a repair shop, and I'm sued, I can win or I can lose, and very much it's going to depend on the facts and how sympathetic the court will be.

Manufacturers also argue that doing a repair wrong could cause the product to work improperly and harm someone… and they don’t want to be liable.

CALBOLI: Companies should be shielded from liability. And that's, that's fair.

Calboli believes that right-to-repair laws that get through the legislative process shouldn’t totally satisfy either side of the debate. Manufacturers need protections to foster innovation, but people should be able to repair their stuff if they want to.

Afton Darnell says she understands that companies need to protect their profits on new products, but she still needs to get their equipment fixed quickly.

DARNELL: It definitely made it so that we were having to use one tractor all the time, and it was really hard on that tractor and people don't realize he can be rough on your equipment out here in the weather. So it just—it's just a domino effect.

After a month, they got the part to fix their tractor. But the whole experience made them even more wary of newer equipment. So for now, they’ll keep fixing their old stuff for as long as they can.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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