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Comment by rlpb | Hacker News Reader

> As Huseby puts it, Apple uses copyright law as a “weapon” by putting multiple logos and QR-codes on each component part of its screens, knowing that the Chinese grey market will not specifically cater to repairers in other countries that zealously enforce copyright.

It seems to me that something like the exhaustion doctrine[1] should be made to apply here (but presumably doesn't in Norway). Once a part is legally sold, even if as part of a bigger product, IP law should not be able to be used to prevent the buyer from doing what they want with the part, including using it in a different product that is then sold as a refurbishment part. The only exception should be to prevent others from being misled about the origin of the product; that doesn't appear to have been happening here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_of_intellectual_pro...

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This is a trademark issue and not copyright. Replacement parts passing themselves off as genuine OEM shouldn't be tolerated. Markings aren't required for the electronics to work. They're just there to deceive the consumer.

This isn't passing off. The logo was placed on the part by Apple. The consumer isn't being deceived; the consumer never even sees the logo! This is discussed elsewhere here already.

How do you know that?

The part was imported into the country.

The customer is 100% being deceived.

Because the article says "...the Oslo District Court ruled in 2018 that Huseby did not violate Apple’s trademark, because Huseby never claimed to be using unused original spare parts".

A court found that the customer wasn't being deceived, and this specific finding has not been overturned on appeal. The issue is about IP rights unrelated to customer deception.

This is a complete bastardisation of the trademark law and it's original purpose - the consumer was not mislead as to the origin of good or their purpose, and has never seen the trademark.

Odd question. As I understand it, Apple flouts EU rules regarding standards ( Lightning charge cable comes to mind ). If a company does not play by the same rules as others, can't it simply be barred from the markets that offer them the legal protections ( just as it demands basic compliance ). Or is this a case of too big to regulate.

As far as I understand, compliance is voluntary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply. Did the EU back down on trying to enforce this?

iPhone AC adapters come with a bog-standard USB-A connector. That's what matters to EU; the connector at the phone end is immaterial.

There are some legitimate and common-sense applications of "terms of service" in physical products. You wouldn't want someone removing a battery from one device to try and retrofit into another and then sell the refurbished device as safe. Inevitable problems could be both a safety issue and injure the reputation of the company.

Whether a phone or watch generally is one of those sorts of products though is certainly something to debate.

> You wouldn't want someone removing a battery from one device to try and retrofit into another and then sell the refurbished device as safe.

I feel like you've never had your car repaired before...

This is exactly something we're fine with protecting and encouraging. The manufacturer of the defective part is at fault, and depending on circumstances the repair person, not the company who originally built the device. Go ahead and try to get Chevy to sell you a brake master cylinder for a 1970 C10, your only options are after market parts manufacturers and that's fine, we've dealt with this for literally as long as there has been n > 1 blacksmiths in a town.

Certainly, this is why I've not made a universal claim above. I have indeed partially rebuilt a couple cars. I generally support right to repair. I recognise that anything against that is anathema here but there's some cases where we need to be able to make exceptions.

Someone buying a refurbished powerbank, for example, may end up lighting something on fire because it was repaired incorrectly.

Yes it'd maybe be on the manufacturer of a replacement regulator if an insulin pump was 3rd-party repaired and failed, but would it maybe be safer to say that the device should be modified or repaired only within its certified supply chain?

There's CE and UL listings for communications and electrical devices to in part protect consumers against poor manufacturing leading to irradiated or electrocuted people.

Could we agree that there's a difference between a bushing and a microcontroller?

I would want exactly this. Lately I got an older model of a smartphone. It was used to present the product, so I'm the first owner. It's ok but the internal battery sucks.

Original batteries aren't some magical spec devices that other batteries can't substitute. Most of them are made by the same few manufacturers and it is trivial to find a replacement with similar specs.

I think you as a user should be able to make this choice, but the parent comment is talking about another scenario, where the person you're buying a refurbished iPhone from has silently replaced parts. I think that at least warrants some sort of disclaimer.

> the person you're buying a refurbished iPhone from has silently replaced parts

Silently? Unless they're passing off a refurbished iPhone as a new one, replacing parts as necessary is exactly what refurbishment means!

As a buyer I might be interested to know if they used only genuine Apple parts, but I'm happy that the market can take care of that and the only legal intervention should be if there was a deliberate misrepresentation. It's perfectly fine for a repairer to use third party parts without having to specifically call it out. This has been done in every other market since the beginning of time, so this would not be misleading anyone.

Refurbished means previously broken and hopefully fixed. In today's reality, fixing is generally by replacing components. If Apple doesn't make repair parts available, they're either coming from other phones, non-oem manufacturing, or possibly grey/black market overproduction.

Refurbished products should always tell you who refurbished them, and you can draw conclusions about the supplies from there. Ideally, they'd also tell you what was replaced, but it can be difficult to track that with the item.

I'm not privy to anything specifically about batteries, and you may be right about the batteries all effectively being the same.

However, I do know - in general - component manufacturers are notorious for cutting corners to save a few cents, doing additional factory runs after hours, altering chemistry, faking specs, etc. It's a shady business climate that needs constant QC.

Also a fair amount of what you pay for is a known chain of custody from component manufacturer to your device. From what I can tell for many components there isn't a clear feedback loop to end customers, as parts travel through several intermediaries, which means its less likely bad quality will lead to repercussions to the component manufacturer. It goes all the way to the repair place, who's typically doing a one-off order for a customer rather than having an ongoing customer relationship, and who may never see a failure 6 months down the line.

As far as batteries, and this may be a hypothetical as I do not know about who's manufacturing what and at what quality, but there's also legitimate safety concerns which is why a higher than typical level of scrutiny is required.

These are all conditions that could lead to potentially higher failure rates. How much higher is debatable, it may be only a percent or two, and for many folks a small additional risk may be worth saving some cash for.

Personally? For older devices I wouldn't care. A newer device, I would.

That's all fine. If you want a known chain of custody, you could exclusively use a manufacturer-authorized repairer, or use a third party repairer who guarantees to only use manufacturer-authorized parts, and so on.

For competition however, I maintain that the consumer should have the ability to choose to do business with a repairer with no supply relationship with the manufacturer who claims to be able to do better. As long as the consumer isn't being misled, the consumer should be entitled to choose to take that risk.

Realistically this would be far less of a problem if Apple didn't pretend that their devices (like everything else in this world) get old, and supported a robust economy around servicing older devices. Why can't I just buy an iPhone SE battery right off Apple.com? Why can't my third party repairer? How about an authorized repairer? Where are the publicly available service manuals? How about some schematics?

Back in the day, high-end electronics (particularly audio equipment) had full-blown schematics, for repair. While reflow re-soldering BGA devices is way out of reach for the average non-technical home users today, with a steady hand, and the right tools, replacing an iPhone battery is only slightly more complicated than changing a tire.

Most of this fear of "something bad could happen if you buy a device with replaced parts" is due to manufacturers making it hard for people to get the original replacement part and service the device. They do this because it increases their profits and because they can get away with it.

It's to control business & brand risk. I believe this explains all downstream choices: how devices are designed and how easy they are to repair, whether they supply repair groups with adequate info, parts availability, etc.

Remember engineers love anything that loosens constraints. Making things easy to repair is a pretty challenging constraint to juggle with all the other constraints like manufacturability, chassis design, thermals, etc.

They say they don't make profit on repairs. I've no particular reason to not believe this. They could design products to be easier to repair and thus cost less to repair, but the fundamental rationale always points back to controlling brand risk, because a drop in customer satisfaction by even 1% is worth billions.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/11/20/are-apple-repairs-profita...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23422661

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