Canada Inches Closer to 'Right to Repair' Reform
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
We have structured practically every legal framework in the digital world around the DMCA. What's our answer to fraud? Copyright. What's our answer to privacy violations? Copyright. What's our answer to libel? Copyright. Free software? Copyright.
This system only helps for a handful of corporations; at the expense of the rest of us. It's time to scrap Copyright and start over.
I quite like the formulation in the American Constitution:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
The good parts of this is that it has a purpose (which is NOT profits), and that the exclusivity should be time-limited.
I am not even a tiny bit convinced that Copyright is helping us reach that goal. I can, however, find a dozen ways it is doing the opposite.
Without copyright you probably wouldn't have an IP behemoth Disney, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't have animated features. I'm not sure the world would be worse off.
I don't see how the purpose is not profit. Profit is simply a unit of measure, one that measures the progress in delivering useful value to society. Which is exactly what the statement purports is the function of said formulation. Profit would merely measure the successfulness of a pursuit.
Being a slumlord seems to be a profitable enterprise that provides nothing useful to society, instead it just leaches off of people who are actually doing useful things for society.
Maybe copyright should go away quicker if their copyrights are transferred to a company or another person.
Considering that I've bought $15 Tracphones with a replaceable battery and SD card slot, I think those poorer households will be okay. It's better than the government buying them garbage that was designed to be obsolete from the start.
Add to this, the fact that many OEMs go for exclusive deals with the parts manufacturers where the parts are not allowed to enter mass market. This is to make repairs costly by creating artificial scarcity. This suggests that the true cost of repairable devices is not as exorbitant or harmful to the poor as these manufacturers and OEMs project it to be. It's more in the realm of disinformation.
Isn't the fairphone basically this?
So you get to choose at which point you'd like to pay for it. Directly and very visibly in an item's price (maybe even making you reconsider if a purchase is actually necessary). Or later, in taxes or a decrease in quality of life due to the increasing overexploitation of our resources.
If you're against the externalization of costs, shouldn't you be advocating for measures that fully internalize such costs (eg. by charging a disposal fee at the point of sale), rather than merely trying to reduce it by making phones more repairable? That way consumers and manufacturers can decide for themselves whether the repairability is worth the extra cost or not.
They are solved by social consensus, and in this particular case, by the passage of the right-to-repair law that forces the entire system from one equilibrium state to the other.
Customers have many different criteria by which they judge phones: price, performance, available apps, social desirability, repairability etc. I would say that repairability is of lower importance than other criteria.
Producers know that selling unrepairable phones produce more profits long term. Obviously repairable phones are also a few perfect more expensive. So from the 00s when phones were largely repairable, to today, producers have sequentially produced phones that are less repairable but a bit cheaper. Ad campaigns have been used to make thinner monolithic phones as more socially desirable [1]. This also changes how customers rate the importance of different criteria.
Any new producer who creates a repairable phone not only has to produce a more expensive phone, but also has to create a niche of customers, against the competitor ad campaigns, that value that repairability. Hence, that new producer is not profitable. This is the equilibrium which explains that lack of mainstream repairable phones in the market.
But of course, consumers want repairable phones, but only if everyone else gets them as well - so they aren't uncool. Which is why different consumer groups have advocated to lawmakers, and now we are getting a law that forces everyone to change in tandem.
[1] Not much different from the cigarette ads of the yesteryears.
But if a repairable phone is cheaper for the consumer overall (the don't have to replace as often), why would this be a problem? Japanese cars outcompeted American cars because they were more reliable, and consumers recognized that. Shouldn't consumers jump at the chance of reducing their overall phone TCO by 50% or whatever?
So at buy time, people don't prefer repairability very high, which is some uncertain future cost. Which is why they make the short term decision to buy the cheaper sexier phone. Later on, when the phone starts to break down, they start caring about it a lot more. We know the latter is true because consumer group advocacy is determined by asking people what they want.
Another tactic phone manufacturers employ is that they don't talk about repairability anywhere, so most consumers don't even know phones are repairable. They think you just have to buy a new phone. It's like if your bowl broke, you would just go and buy a new one because you believe bowls cannot be repaired. But if you belonged in the right area/tradition of japan, you would just take the pieces of the bowl and join them together [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference#Temporal_disco...
You can make the same argument for cars, yet reliable japanese cars won out. Smartphones have been around for 15 years now? I think that's long enough for people to figure out how much repairs they need.
> We know the latter is true because consumer group advocacy is determined by asking people what they want.
And yet their purchasing decisions don't line up with what their survey replies are, by and large. It's not because of lack of choice, repairable phones exist, and have existed for a while now. Fairphone is on its 6th iteration now? Yet its uptake is lackluster. Between stated preferences and revealed preferences, I'm going with the latter.
>Another tactic phone manufacturers employ is that they don't talk about repairability anywhere, so most consumers don't even know phones are repairable. They think you just have to buy a new phone.
If you think consumers can't be bothered to do a "[phone name] repairability" search (despite the fact that they care about such a thing, as you claim above), and need to have the info spoon fed to them by the manufacturers, then maybe they don't really care about it?
> It's like if your bowl broke, you would just go and buy a new one because you believe bowls cannot be repaired. But if you belonged in the right area/tradition of japan, you would just take the pieces of the bowl and join them together [2].
Of course, in our modern economy, it makes little sense to fix broken bowls. They can be manufactured so cheaply and fixing it manually taxes so much time/materials that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Something similar applies to phones, only that replacing a phone also comes with the additional benefit that it has a faster cpu + more memory + better camera. You don't get any of that by making phones repairable.
I'd actually argue the opposite.
Historically the poor have been the ones who repair their property rather than throwing it out and replacing it. It's far cheaper to repair than it is to replace.
Assuming the poor repair and the rich replace, as is tradition, then I would argue a modest price increase would represent the rich subsidizing the poor.
Based on the article, particularly the part that describes the bill [1], this is the former.
Amending the law so that it doesn't prevent repairing things adds absolutely no cost to manufacturing...
[1] "The bill would amend the Canadian copyright act, allowing individuals or independent repair shops to break digital locks in order to make software fixes."
Anything beyond that probably needs to be a signal from consumers that they _want_ (and perhaps be willing to pay a price premium for) repairable goods with available parts and documentation.
Methinks it would be better if we stopped people from shipping pointlessly hostile features like serialized parts. Just to be sure.
It works like this. Pick two:
* replaceable battery
* ingress protection
* small size