U.S. lawmakers introduce 'Right to Repair' bills to spur competition | Hacker News Reader

U.S. lawmakers introduce 'Right to Repair' bills to spur competition

reuters.com

57 pointsmark-ruwt10 comments

Without right to repair we throw away the first two "R"s in reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Unfortunately right to repair allows competitors including patent ignorers to duplicate, deceive, and dilute. Look at wireless earbuds in a rechargable jellybean case, anyone remember the first company to build them? You can find a hundred knockoffs.

Right to repair is great for consumers and businesses will need to be more ruthless and secret to survive.

> Unfortunately right to repair allows competitors including patent ignorers to duplicate, deceive, and dilute. Look at wireless earbuds in a rechargable jellybean case, anyone remember the first company to build them? You can find a hundred knockoffs.

What does that have to do with RtR? We have endless knockoffs today, as-is, with nothing but cheap manufacturing and copycat products; even if RtR lowered the bar to reverse engineering (which is possible but I'm skeptical that the effect will be significant), make more blatant ripoffs that happen to have slightly better internals?

> Right to repair is great for consumers and businesses will need to be more ruthless and secret to survive.

Or we could legally force it and carry on in public.

I'm guessing you're gonna tell me the first company to make such earbuds was not Apple? I'm interested to know who it was.

> Right to repair is great for consumers and businesses will need to be more ruthless and secret to survive.

Knock-off makers seem to be doing just fine right now by reverse-engineering products. Do you think this is going to make their life much easier?

I believe it will. This is not a rejection of right to repair. Farmers with tractors they cannot fix and electronics in landfills outweigh the cost to business, but it is troublesome. A patent industry paradigm shift must happen, perhaps shifting the burden to pay to Amazon, Walmart and other retailers when they sell knock offs which violate patents.

> I'm guessing you're gonna tell me the first company to make such earbuds was not Apple? I'm interested to know who it was.

Well, Syllable D900 were out at least a year before Apple announced theirs. The first ones? No idea.

> including patent ignorers

If somebody is ignoring the law with impunity, new laws are not going to change that.

Who cares about the 'original' earbud makers? Even if everyone copies each other, someone will stand up and innovate in order to sell and survive. It's a natural occurrence.

The article put the scare quotes in the wrong place. Because the whole point of my right to repair what I own is to "spur competition."

They aren't scare quotes tho. They're fairly regularly used around "right to repair" movement. It sets it off as a recognizable unit as we don't have a single word in english for "right to repair"

The title of an article is not written by the same person who writes the article.

Sad state of affairs. Media treat headlines like advertising space -- something to be monetized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com