Hi everyone,
I am new to the Bad Voltage community, I love the show. I am now going through and listening to a load of episodes in reverse order. Have just got as far as this one.
As someone who cares passionately about the right to repair I think one thing that was overlooked is the rights of those who have never had the resources to buy products new. They have no power over the market, they they are the most affected.
As a bit of context, and to reveal my bias. I work at the University of Bath on the OpenFlexure project which is an open source hardware project that is trying to empower local manufacturers in sub-Saharan Africa be able to build laboratory grade microscopes, with the eventual aim of getting these into clinics for medical diagnosis. Issues around right to repair, such as availability of spare parts and service manuals, chipped components stopping unauthorised repair is literally killing people. The WHO estimate that 70% of medical equipment in Sub-Saharan Africa is out of service!
The point with the tractor for example is not whether it voids the warranty if you take it to the wrong dealer. The problem is that many farmers in remote communities (and especially in the Global South) don’t have fast access to a dealer, whether or not the equipment is within warranty. If I have 20 acres (and you have 43), now I’ve got a brand new combine harvester, and it better work when I turn the bloody key. If it doesn’t I need to fix now it before my plants rot on the ground. This is why farmers are often the brilliant mechanics. The John Deere DRM (probably the wrong term) can stop me buying a second hand spare component and replacing it because I don’t have the dongle to pair the it to the harvester. The real problem probably is not warranty, but the fact that 40 years from now when John Deere will have forgotten about these models, people should have the right to keep them working with second hand spare parts. During this pandemic the exact same issue of trained engineers not being able to repair ventilators without a dongle!
The topic of cars that used to be repairable and now aren’t is an interesting one. I visited an area of Ghana called Suame magazine, it is about 200k mechanics working in small businesses of just a few people who repair everything from 18 wheelers to farm equipment to cars. They are casting iron, re-boring engine blocks, building new chassis from scratch. But you will notice all the cars are pre-fuel injection. We talked to one of the government trade schools and they were saying that while the off the shelf device that reads error codes are available, much of the advanced diagnostics needed to repair and replace sensors is proprietary and manufacturer specific. A company in the UK or the US can afford to buy licenses from 10 manufacturers for diagnostic computers, in much of the world this is not the case.
Another point is the recycling policy. Recycling tech generally means that it get stuffed in a bin and sent to Africa. Much of this is not broken down into the raw materials. The TV with a line of dead pixels just get re-used in an area where a TV with dead pixels it better than no TV. Bricking a device before “recycling” it is insane. Many things are not economic to repair in the Europe, but I have seen people in Tanzania chiseling out the windings of an electric motor and rewinding it by hand for say the motor in a fridge. What is repairable should not be left up to the whims of people who have the disposable income to buy a fridge that can access facebook.
The market cannot be left to self regulate this. Affluent people in affluent countries buy new cars and new tech, but these policy largely affect people who have no power to affect these markets. Government regulation does not need to force companies to extend a warranty to a device that has been mended by someone who is not approved, but it needs to stop them creating software “solutions” that hinder the repair. Regulation can also force manufacturers to make spare parts available for a number of years for certain classes of devices. Obviously we don’t want governments regulating everything, and this is where the discussion should be. Do you have a “right” to repair a smart light bulb that you bought so you can use your phone to turn the lights off when your partner is taking a dump? Probably not. Do you have a right to repair a tractor that your livelihood and the food security of your community depends on? Yes, very yes! Other devices fall somewhere between these extremes.
Sorry for the long preachy post.
