The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State
eff.org
eff.org
Come January 1, 2026, manufacturers must also stop using parts pairing to block repairs for these devices. That means no more pop-ups that say “unknown part” when you swap in a working screen. No more downgrading your camera or fingerprint sensor just because you repaired your own phone.
SB 5680 goes even further for wheelchair users. It covers power wheelchairs, manual wheelchairs, power-assist devices, and mobility scooters. Manufacturers will have to provide not only parts and tools, but also firmware and embedded software, the stuff that’s often used to digitally lock out independent fixes.Text as passed (for pasting into LLM :)): https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Ho...
I wondered what it would mean for small manufacturers and they are not exempt however o3 believes "in practice, your duty is limited to providing whatever service manuals, firmware-pairing utilities, and spare parts you already possess (or have made for warranty work) and making them available at cost, digitally for free."
EDIT: as people below have posted, o3's "at cost" is misleading, the text actually says "at costs that are fair to both parties"
That's the only kind of example I can think of.
Typically nobody would actually go through with placing any orders beyond that point, unless they’re the pentagon.
I don’t think anyone suggested manufacturers could get away with lying all the time.
my company has looked into spending billions for a chip fad of obsolete processes just to get some no longer in prodction parts. So far not worth it.
Businesses previously and will continue to negate it in practice, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes not. And most of the time nobody outside of a small group will know for sure.
The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.
Many years ago I was servicing Maserati GranTurismos and Quattroportes of which some use a ZF 6 speed auto transmission. Since the same transmission is used in Land Rovers, I would buy parts from the Land Rover dealer which was nearby. One time I went there and they didn't have any fluid for the transmission for Land Rovers, but they did for Jaguar. The fluid was identical, but on a different shelf, and cost a lot more. The parts department said that Jaguar uses a 3rd party parts distribution contract in North America, but Land Rover does it in house, so every Jaguar part, of which many are identical to Land Rovers, costs more. They could not just bill out a Land Rover part internally to their own dealer to service a Jaguar either (they were a franchise that repaired both).
The main point I made is the upthread summary (which appears to be unreviewed ChatGPT spew, adding noise rather than signal to the discussion) of the law is incorrect in an obvious way that the actual bill is not.
The intent of a patent is that you invent something useful and get a temporary monopoly over it as the incentive for the invention. The premise is that the value of the patent is proportional to the value of the invention, and therefore the incentive we want to create for inventing it. If you invent something which is no improvement over the status quo then nobody is going to pay you a premium for it.
The problem comes when you patent an interface, like the connector between a razor handle and a blade. Because then even if the connector is nothing special, the replacement blades have to use that connector and then you get artificial demand for the connector, not because it's such a great connector but because the customer is in the market for blades for their existing razor. It's a mechanism of cheating the patent system by collecting a premium disproportionate to the value of what you invented.
This is even worse in tech products because a phone costs a lot more than a razor, so if you need a part, the amount they can stick you for because there is only one place to get the part is proportional to the value of a $900 phone instead of a $7 razor. And on top of that, they're not trying to sell you replacement parts, they're trying to turn your existing phone into slag so they can sell you a new phone.
Which is why the most important thing is that you can get repair parts from third parties, who both provide competition for parts and actually want to sell them because their primary business is selling repair parts instead of selling new phones.
So I could find some manufacturer using a part I want and order it at their cost rather than having to go to a retailer?
Is there anything that allows a manufacturer to require you send in the broken part after or any limit to how many times something can be "repaired"? Because I'd like to purchase a very large number of NVIDIA GPUs at cost.
> Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to require any original manufacturer or authorized repair provider to make available any parts, tools, or documentation required for the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of a video game console and its components and peripherals.
Wonder if Valve/Xbox/Nintendo asked for that, this being Washington State.
I would 100% percent expect both Microsoft & Nintendo to have had a hand in that though.
More like, connections which form because people meet each other over time. Or jump back and forth between companies, because their office location doesn't change much. That would lead to a flow of ideas between the two companies in a totally organic and not problematic kind of way. People know each other and talk shop occasionally while at the gym, or yoga or the neighborhood BBQ or whatever.
It's an uneasy balance and it will be interesting to see where it goes once the dust settles on the current antitrust actions against big tech. I can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?
(I'm saying this all as a right-to-repair and antitrust advocate, by the way)
I think a lot of this is a result of nostalgia, and a recognition that the business model of the video game industry has depended on this sort of control for a significantly longer than the personal computing industry. So no one really wants to kill Nintendo like they don't want to kill Mickey Mouse. Or, more cynically, no one really wants Nintendo and other video game behemoths to step into this fight on the other side, because going after Big Tech is hard enough as it is.
Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game. An iPhone on the other hand, people bank, book hotels, restaurants, flights, get directions, get taxis/uber/lift, order doordash/other takeout, make investments, plan for retirement, buy things from various businesses amazon/target/walmart, communicate via messanges/discord/fb/whatup/wechat, watch TV/youtube/tiktok, plan events/parties/get-togethers, make video calls via facetime/zoom/meet, take and share videos/phones, etc etc etc.
Apple is trying to control 100% of that and take a cut of 100% of that. They're effectively trying to be the middleman to the entire world. Nintendo maybe 1000 companies try to do business with you, selling you a game. iPhone probably > 100000 companies are trying to do business with you and Apple gets to say for each and everyone of them whether or not they are allowed to do business, how much they have to pay apple for each transaction, what payment systems they're allow/required to accept. They only recently got in trouble for requiring Apple's payment systems first. They shouldn't be allowed this control over so much.
And that's the difference between a video game console and an iPhone (or Android)
Well, this becomes a bit of a circular argument, but certainly part of the reason for that is the only thing one can do on a Nintendo Switch is game, due to its restrictive software.
And, strictly speaking, this statement is false. The only thing most people do on a Nintendo Switch is play games, but there is a subset of people that hack their switches and install things like Android TV. The thing is basically just an Nvidea Shield, hardware-wise. Not being able to do everything an Nvidea Shield can do is a software restriction.
I do see your point re: Apple's ambitions being far vaster than Nintendo's. But in terms of controlling their own markets, they are still seeking similar levels of control.
> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss.
So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing against customers right now) has to stop making their products unusable when non-OEM parts are used for a repair.
Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.
> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to ... Reduce the functionality or performance of a digital electronic product
Dismissable would have to be defined, but when being annoying about it it should be possible to show that it reduces the functionality. It would be clearly against the spirit of the law, but sure, Apple already risked management jail time by ignoring court orders so they might try stuff here as well.
"How dare you be anything less than blindly enthusiastic about this obviously good thing, you've clearly been tricked by someone evil."
https://techhq.com/2024/02/apple-right-to-repair-oregon-bill... https://doctorow.medium.com/apple-fucked-us-on-right-to-repa...
Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse value, not a superior product.
Once they tell you what the actual difference is - if there even is one - you can judge whether it's worth it. Your cable is 800Mbps and the cheap one is only 40Mbps? I want a charging cable, I don't move data over it, don't care. Your part is guaranteed for 3 years and the cheap one isn't? Now I'm interested, I never had one last more than 2 years so either you're buying me a replacement when that happens again or yours lasts longer, both are good outcomes.
Maybe it's literally the same cable from the same factory, but without the logo. Maybe it's the same cable from the same factory, but the Chinese company decided to skimp on materials and quality control on the off-brand ones, and it's going to burn your house down after a year. Maybe it's a competing factory trying to reverse-engineer the design, who figured out how to "optimize" it by removing an "unnecessary" part, which was actually engineered in as a crucial safety precaution. You never know.
You may even buy the same non-genuine part you've been buying for years, from the same seller, and suddenly go from an exact copy to the "competing factory" case.
Non-OEM laptop batteries? Not fine. These very reliably work less well and fail or lose capacity much sooner.
I imagine similar differences exist for many other kinds of parts as well.
If you buy a TPM that won’t codesign your MacBook’s bootloader (or that uses a compromised signing key) and it was advertised as an equivalent replacement to the OEM’s TPM, that advertising was false. This isn’t much different from buying a smaller hard drive for a computer: just because it works in the machine doesn’t mean it’s as big as the old one, and if it was advertised as 1TB and only stores 500GB, then the advertising is false.
I legitimately share the parent's concern. In a related matter, insurance companies are allowed to force me to accept non-OEM parts when my car is repaired. It sucks that someone can crash into me, and force me into taking sub-standard parts.
I do know with cars, replacement parts sometimes have fitment issues that cause body shops hassles, driving up labor costs, and having replacement parts devalues a desirable car. (on the other hand, so does ANY bodywork, even with OE parts).
That doesn’t mean you’ll wind up with the same car you had before. The parts might be unobtainable. Or the car’s value may have depreciated enough to be less than the cost of repair.
It’s sucky that you are “forced” to acquire new parts or car, but that’s life. They will pay you the fair amount for damages, not necessarily restore exactly to the previous state.
He can't even change the battery pack without sending it back to the company. The horn shorted out, and if we had disabled it (he can't even use it), it would've voided the entire warranty. Fuck, one of the wheel spoke things cracked and we couldn't even put a new wheel on it, because they only sell the wheels as part of the lower chassis to the tune of 5k.
It's obscenely expensive to have a disability in the US, and these companies take advantage of people who just want to have basic mobility. It's really disgusting.
The Magnuson-Moss Act pretty surely falsifies that claim by the manufacturer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warran...
Since these are presumably financed by the government, the first two options may not even be available to most.
I'm curious if that means that it's now illegal for the company to tell you if you have a device with fake parts.
I also don't quite understand the security implications. If you need some attested part, like a TPM, and this and some other thing like a fingerprint sensor fail and you replace them both, you cannot disable the fingerprint sensor since now technically it cannot attest itself?
If you replace the sensor with a "fake" one, old fingerprint data becomes invalid. This would be good enough for users, as adding their fingerprints back would take them minutes at most, while providing no value for attackers.
https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Ho...
It's only 12 pages and is easy to understand.
Since Axis doesn't actually manufacture SD cards, they are obviously rebranded high-endurance cards from one of the major fabs (possibly with some minor firmware parameter tweaks). Except, they cost twice as much and aren't as generally available.
Would this law have any bearing on that business practice?
Namely, you cannot add the camera to a site for access from Camera Station Edge. This applies to both the desktop and mobile flavors of the software.
On the desktop version of Edge, there's a little-known hack you can make to a config file to override the behavior. But this means you need to drag a computer to the physical site for the initial provisioning.
There is no such override available on the mobile app.
(Also depending exactly how you provision, the Storage, Motion Detection and Continuous Recording toggles will be disabled when viewing the device in Edge).
It's a weird place to gatekeep, and reeks of pure sales / marketing driven impetus.
With the same loophole, i.e., selling assembly parts meaning screen with hinge and camera etc(expensive). instead of just the display(cheap).
Apparently, there is one slight variation > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182235
Are there generators you can't fix right now? I assumed most of them are pretty basic designs, an ICE with either an inverter or non-inverter generator. You can look up how to tear them down and repair them step by step on YouTube (including commercial units)
In the 1990s that software was write-once, non-upgradeable, and bug-free because it was trivial. But it hasn't been that way for a long time. "Fuel injection requires software" turned into an exploit vector for feature creep.
The early electronic components were not reliable in an underhood environment and were not easily modified as engine control requirements advanced. Most of the 35 vehicles originally equipped with Electrojector were retrofitted with 4-barrel carburetors.
I'm guessing the rationale of the law is to prevent needing a repair company to exist & reinvent the electrical components of every single product in existence.
Like McDonald's Shake Machines had a 3rd party tool to help diagnose issues.
This is the risk of franchising in general. You lose a certain amount of control over quality and you put your brand at much greater risk. In exchange, you get to expand your brand much faster than if you did it under centralized control and investment.
The rest is fairly simple ICE like you say.
Parts pairing is also a/the reason you can't just swap in the junkyard unit even though it came from a car with the same engine. We tried it - did not work.
Potting within a brick of epoxy is the real dick move, but also not impossible to repair either.
Though I think there should be a process to get the parts paired after verifying the car isn't stolen. I'm not sure what that would be though.
I also have Gold mount and V-mount type batteries that I'd love to have the cells replaced. If you think power tool batteries are expensive, take a look at film/video batteries!
(I should probably pick one of these up before Torque Test Channel does a video on them and they end up getting sold out for a year.)
Edit: I'm referring to the PDNation universal battery + brand-specific adapter in particular.
You can buy a battery build kit for M18 tools (for example) on AliExpress that comes with everything but the cells.
I'm a bit of a tool nerd and I'm not aware of any power tools that are doing DRM in their tools to prevent usage of third-party batteries but I don't mind being wrong so I know which brands to avoid.
Mixing old cells with new can lead to a runaway thermal event in the worst case (i.e. unstoppable cancer-causing fire).
From the article:
Of course, these wins come with carve-outs. HB 1483 exempts:
Video game consoles
Medical devices
Motor vehicles
Agricultural and construction equipment
Security systems and alarm equipment
Internet and TV equipment from ISPs
Off-road recreational vehicles
Large-scale energy storage and solar gear
Low earth orbit broadband gear (until 2044)[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/110039/double-trouble-for-repair...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/right-repair-law-washi...
"tell me the state of washington protects failing US auto manufacturers and shade tree mechanics without saying it".
But hey, at least now I can rest assured knowing that korean smartphones are now going to be a little cheaper to repair in wshington.
That said, it's not just Tesla that has broken this model; Volkswagen Auto Group in particular are famous for requiring proprietary tools and software packages to diagnose and repair their vehicles, and refusing to sell tools/software to independent shops. I think some manufacturers are just more tightly coupled to dealerships, so there's a profit motive in forcing all repairs to happen through them.
you have to incentivize the market to build repairable products. the proper solution is the complete removal of software and hardware patents or copyright. our age is control of production, everythings been engineered already.
They do. By making the parts needed for repairs unavailable to you. And by making it really hard for other manufacturers to make compatible parts.
The security argument can be achieved just as well by giving the user the master key (on a Yubikey-style HSM if needed) to unlock the protection.
The fact it's not done that way clearly shows the primary security they care about is that of Apple's bank account.
What's better, low prices and low wages, or high prices and high wages? The "Chicago school of macroeconomics" holds the first position. I'm highly critical of that position.
Even if you do agree with the Chicago school, there is a problem: by vertically integrating the repairs market, you take away the consumer's ability to repair their own products. The consumer is forced to pay the business to do the repairs, instead of doing it themselves for free. That's objectively more expensive for the consumer.
By allowing companies to vertically integrate repairs into their product business, we have allowed them to create an entirely new market of rent-seeking. This both monopolizes a service (preventing competition) and adds extra cost to consumers. It doesn't matter what your ideological stance is on economics: this is objectively bad for consumers.
If your position is that market competition is what will overcome the negative implications of anticompetitive behavior, your position is logically incoherent.
The reality is that the only way to be competitive on price (and thereby survive as a business) is to do your own rent-seeking. We can all plainly see that this is how it has played out in reality. No business can actually rely on the promise of right-to-repair obsessed consumers to keep them afloat.
2. These anti-repair practices are anti-consumer, because they're specifically designed to make the process more difficult and expensive for consumers.
3. This is sort of along the lines of planned obsolescence. The reality is that making your product shittier on purpose is actually a viable business strategy when you have decent market share. It shouldn't be.
2. A product who is more complicated and expensive to repair is not necessarily a worse product. This could be a trade off in favor of something consumers value more.
3. It's normal to target a lifespan for a product. For mature products ignoring it is a sign of amateurs. This is not the same thing as making a product bad on purpose.
2. Sure, but this is not why it's being done. It can be a trade-off, but we have to be honest and acknowledge that a lot of products are specifically made worse because you can make more money that way. Anti-repair is a racketeering scheme first, any other "benefits" are secondary. That doesn't mean they aren't real benefits, but it does mean that they were never the intention.
3. Planned obsolesce is the same as making a product worse on purpose to make more money. That doesn't mean that targeting a lifespan is bad. But when you shift from making washing machines that last 20 years to ones that last 5, that's an intentional choice to get more money from consumers.
In general, this tired adage about "market efficiency" has stopped making sense to most people a long time ago. Whatever unregulated markets are efficient at, it's not making the average person's life better. Don't be surprised then that said average person votes for regulation.