Right to Repair War rages on, with data access a new frontier, Juha Saarinen reports

By now many of us will be familiar with the ongoing Right to Repair War that has been fought for decades between manufacturers and people and companies buying their goods. 

It’s a long story of how technology, while bringing useful new features and improving the performance of existing products like cars, can also lock people out of the things they think they own. Not being able to independently maintain what you own is a bug bear for many, particularly if repairs are expensive and slow through dealers.

Reducing waste by fighting the pervasive and unsustainable “Throwaway Culture” is also putting pressure on manufacturers to stop designing products with built-in obsolescence. 

Overseas, Right to Repair movements have sprung up in response to the situation, along with regulation and legislation safeguarding people who want to fix their gear instead of throwing it away and buying new. 

France has introduced a Repairability Index for five product categories:, 

• Smartphones
• Laptops
• Televisions
• Washing machines
• Lawnmowers

The index has been around since 2021 and takes into account how easy or hard it is to disassemble the product, the manuals for it, spare part availability and pricing, and product-specific information. Manufacturers are responsible for providing the information. Cheating risks big fines and of course, a reputational catastrophe for makers.

In its Fall [Autumn] Economic Statement last year, the Canadian government said it would amend the law “in order to prevent manufacturers from refusing to provide the means of repair of devices and products in an anti-competitive manner.”

The American states of Massachusetts and Maine have also enacted laws to ensure independent repairability for vehicles.

New Zealand ponders Right to Repair, but the law is in the way

In New Zealand the situation is different. Here, the balance drastically swung almost entirely in favour of rights holders in 2008 when the Copyright Act was amended by the Parliament. 

 One consequence of that law change is that it is illegal to bypass so-called technology protection measures (TPMs) under the Copyright Act of 1994. TPM is essentially digital rights management (DRM) software limiting access to systems, and/or the data they contain.

The penalty for “hacking” your way through them can be a fine of $150,000 or five years in prison, or an equally unpleasant mix of both. Not that there appear to have been any prosecutions for TPM tampering, as lawyer Rich Shera of Lowndes Jordan in Auckland said.

"I am also not aware of anyone having a librarian crack a TPM to engage in a permitted act (and I did survey librarians shortly after the provisions came in), so the whole regime is, by and large, a little visited backwater of copyright law, despite the heated arguments about it at the time it was being passed!” Shera added.

The legal TPM menace notwithstanding, New Zealand is thinking about Right to Repair, with WasteMINZ publishing a report in 2019 which focused mainly on minimising e-waste. Called Pathways for Right to Repair the report outlines market skews like repairs and spare parts for many devices being so expensive that it’s cheaper to dispose of the broken gear and buy new instead. 

What’s apparent from the report is that many people who submitted to WasteMINZ feel uncomfortable about throwing things away instead of repairing them; however, in some cases they feel there are no options, as the repairable items are unaffordable to them.

Oh Deere, tractor hacking now?

A locally relevant story involves John Deere, which has copped much criticism for locking farmers out of their tractors with software, making field repairs without calling in authorised representatives from the company difficult and expensive. 

 One such John Deere TPM was broken with some deft hack-work by Australian researcher “Sick Codes” in 2022. He was able to get dealer-level access on the displays that control the tractors, and was even able to install the classic Doom video game on them.

 John Deere has become a case study on the effects of TPM, and customers are now taking legal action against the tractor maker to ensure the Right to Repair.

 As a related aside that adds nuance to the story, John Deere used the software locks to remotely disable tractors pillaged by Russians from Ukraine.

 That John Deere has remote access to tractors is both great as it stopped the plundering Russian invaders, and worrisome as it means AgTech is now added to the list of critical cyber infrastructure to monitor. 

US wants access to data for repairability

Now the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal auditor-general, has taken stock of how increasingly advanced vehicle technologies that transfer data directly over-the-air to car makers get in the way of consumers being able to use independent repair shops, which do not have access to the information.

The Vehicle Repair: Information on Evolving Vehicle Technologies and Consumer Choice Report, which was updated last week, noted it does seem to be the case that independent repairers face limits to their access to information, along with tools. In turn, this could make repairs more expensive and inconvenient for some consumers, GAO noted.

Technicians need manuals and wiring diagrams, vehicle health and repair data, and diagnostic tools to access them. While car makers have operated under a voluntary agreement in the US since 2014 to provide the information and tools for independent repair shops, that deal is now weakened.

This despite car makers and independent repairers agreeing to reaffirm the principles of the 2014 agreement last year.

Independent repair shops complained to the GAO that they were locked out of some diagnostics data, such as for the tyre pressure monitoring system, on specific vehicle makes when using third-party scanning tools.

Some shops could not program parts installed in many vehicles because they do not have the access to do that; other garages complained they could not use third-party diagnostics tools and instead, had to use ones sold by the car manufacturer for newer vehicles.

In some cases, the independent repairers had to take the customers’ vehicles to the dealerships to complete work that was impossible to do without full access to data.

It’s a thorny situation where car makers, for example, could have access to fault data through OTA communications, whereas independent repairers do not. This would necessitate customers to bring their vehicles into the independent shop for diagnosis, whereas dealerships would already have that fault data.

The US Federal Trade Commission will now look into the data access situation. FTC has been monitoring the repairability situation, and took action against a car maker in 2015 for telling vehicle owners they needed to use their dealerships for maintenance and repairs, or risk voiding their warranties.

This is something that New Zealand regulators need to keep a close eye on, as cars aren’t getting any less complicated. Consumers becoming locked in and only able to use dealerships for service and repairs could push up costs significantly.