Comment by marincounty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marincounty | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder if we really own the products we buy. It feels like I'm theoretically leasing, more and more products. Item breaks down, you need to send it back to the company. "We don't sell our service manuals." I need to buy their toner, ink, etc?

I repair watches. Their are certain brands I cannot buy parts for. Even as a certified watch repairer, most companies won't sell parts to me, or anyone else--no matter how much experience you have. You are forced to send that watch back to the factory, and pay outragious prices for repair and service.

So you did ok financially. You go out and buy a fine watch. A watch designed to be taken apart--over and over again. A watch you plan to hand down to your kids. The only problem is you, and everyone else who owns that watch needs to send it back to the factory for service(cleaning, and oiling), and parts when it stops keeping time. You don't own the watch, you are mearly leasing it. It's not about quality service; it's about money.

If you happen to own one of these watches. If it ever stops don't think you have the right to repair it yourself, or decide who repairs your timepiece. It has to go back to the factory.

A. Lange & Sohne Alfred Dunhill (Rolex, and Omega sell to some certified watch repairers, but are trying to find ways to eliminate 3rd party watch repairers.) Audemars Piguet Bertolucci Blancpain Breguet Breitling Bulgari Cartier Certina Chaumet Chopard Daniel Mink David Yurman Dior Diesel Doxa Fossil Franck Muller Frederique Constant Glycine Guess Harry Winston Hublot Jaeger-LeCoultre Krieger Luminox Marcel Watch Meylan Stopwatches Mont Blanc Nixon Parmigiani Piaget Pierre Balmain Raymond Weil RGM Sector Skagen Tourneau Tutima Ulysse Nardin Vacheron Constantin Van Cleef & Arpels Zodiac

Yes, the watch analogy is little off topic, but I believe relevant. If consumers don't smarten up, more and more companies are going to be "milking" you for money, or we will be forced--economically to just buy another expensive unit of their product? (It's not just ostentatious watches, it's car companies that won't sell 3rd party auto repairers scan codes in order to repair their complicated/mess of wires, and computers? It's more product than people realize? I believe in recycling/repairing goods? I don't like this throw away society.

I feel terrible that my sausagy American fingers accidentally downvoted you because you make an excellent point. I fear that by stripping people of their agency when it comes to things they've already purchased implies that companies not only still own things you buy, but by extension, they own you. They own your priorities for use, your necessity for repair, and your creativity for adaptation. It's like if it were illegal to use anything but Home Depot(TM) nails on Home Depot(TM) planks, or auto shops that have to kick back to Ford or GM or else they couldn't touch your car.

I can't see this principle as anything but incumbent crony capitalism and a completely unnecessary drag on the economy.

> It's like if it were illegal to use anything but Home Depot(TM) nails on Home Depot(TM) planks, or auto shops that have to kick back to Ford or GM or else they couldn't touch your car.

It's actually nothing like that. It's like Ford refusing to sell you parts for your car. Or Apple refusing to sell you parts for their computers. Nothing says you can't acquire parts from another manufacturer, nor is there anything preventing you from performing the repairs yourself. (Other than maybe warranty terms, which is IMO not a moral hazard.)

> Nothing says you can't acquire parts from another manufacturer, nor is there anything preventing you from performing the repairs yourself.

Incorrect.

> I'm not sure if you've been keeping up with US news, but this isn't true, at least until it's decided in court. GM, John Deere, and Ford all have the opposite opinion[1][2][3]

> [1]http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2015/04/john-deere-and....

> [2]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150421/23581430744/gm-sa....

> [3]http://news.boldride.com/2015/04/gm-wants-to-make-working-on....

> Not to mention I think it's currently illegal to Jailbreak an iPhone or root an Android, despite them being yours.

> I really do wish the US was as cut/dry as you make it seem, and I wish they cared about consumers more, but in reality, Companies get far more rights then we, as consumers, do.

For instance: parts that refuse to work unless all other parts return a handshake containing a copyrighted message.

Why don't third parties step in to make parts? If the vendor's repair service is so overpriced, the market should respond by creating competing parts manufacturers + repair services.

It's not exactly easy to make watch parts. The manufacturers already have the tools so they could produce them at reasonable prices. But for a third party it would be very hard and the volume is probably extremely low.

This is exactly the sort of niche that fully automated single-part manufacturing equipment can fill.

While you're not going to be able to print a replacement part for a mechanical watch with a RepRap any time soon, a specialty machine that could duplicate parts by putting the original on a microscope slide and taking some photos could be useful whenever the replacement parts are unavailable from the manufacturer at a lesser cost.

Some hobbyist-grade volume printers and CNC mills have been employed to make car repairs in instances where the manufacturer sells for $50 some nylon gear assembly that contains $0.10 of plastic and some commodity steel axle pins. Sometimes, the nylon is replaced by CNC-machined aluminum (at higher materials cost--maybe $2 instead of $0.10), and that part will never need to be repaired again for the lifetime of the vehicle.

Such one-off manufacturing moves the market from zero competition, where the market can be manipulated and controlled, to a more competitive model. Even if the original manufacturer can create a replacement part at 1% the cost of a home-repairer garage-manufacturing a part, the threat of it places an upper limit on what the business can charge for their officially sanctioned repairs.

It is the manufacturer's refusal to sell those parts at a reasonable price that creates the market opportunity. Every complete new watch must necessarily contain working parts. So someone buys one, takes it apart, makes detailed photographs, and discovers the means to duplicate the parts. It's not whether the parts can be produced at lower cost, but whether they are made available for sale by anyone at lower cost. If it costs you $20 to make a part that can be produced at $0.02, it hardly matters to you if the only way you can get that is by paying $100 and shipping to and from the factory.

I think your example with the watches is actually entirely non-relevant. I personally don't advocate for laws forcing companies to sell isolated parts to third-parties. It's certainly a nice thing for a company to do, and I would take that into consideration during a purchase.

To be analogous, the watch companies would need to be suing people for repairing their watches, perhaps by cannibalizing parts from other broken watches. I haven't heard of any watch makers doing that, and until they do, there is no attempt to subvert the doctrine of first-sale that we are seeing with the Lexmark case.

Well... No. If I bought a nice watch, I am not required to send it back to the manufacturer to fix and clean it. I can find a watch repairman to do that. Of course he might not have the tools, or he might have to fabricate the parts. But I am under no legal obligation to return it to the factory.

A blog page listing reasonable quality watches that can be repaired would be useful. It would be tricky to post on HN - watches attract a lot of spammy pages and HN probably filters that stuff out. You might need to coordinate with dang before posting. (I feel sorry for whoever has a handbag startup).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com