The US Government Wants to Permanently Legalize the Right to Repair

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The US Government Wants to Permanently Legalize the Right to Repair

June 23rd, 2017

Awake Goy

In one of the biggest wins for the right to repair movement yet, the US Copyright Office suggested Thursday that the US government should take actions to make it legal to repair anything you own, forever—even if it requires hacking into the product’s software.

Manufacturers—including John Deere, Ford, various printer companies, and a host of consumer electronics companies—have argued that it should be illegal to bypass the software locks that they put into their products, claiming that such circumvention violated copyright law.

This means that for the last several years, consumer rights groups have had to repeatedly engage in an “exemption” process to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Essentially, the Librarian of Congress decides which circumventions of copyright should be lawful—for example, unlocking your cell phone or hacking your tractor to be able to repair the transmission. But these exemptions expire every three years, and require going through a protracted legal process to earn. Additionally, a separate exemption is required for each product category—right now it’s legal to hack software to repair a car, but not to repair a video game console.

“It’s really arduous—no one is under the impression Joe Q. Public can walk in and do the exemption process,” Meredith Rose, a staff attorney at Public Knowledge, which works on exemptions, told me. “You have to propose the language to the exemption, there’s a comment period, and the procedure changes every round as well.”

Thursday, the US Copyright Office said it’s tired of having to deal with the same issues every three years; it should be legal to repair the things you buy—everything you buy—forever.

“The growing demand for relief under section 1201 has coincided with a general understanding that bona fide repair and maintenance activities are typically noninfringing,” the report stated. “Repair activities are often protected from infringement claims by multiple copyright law provisions.”

“The Office recommends against limiting an exemption to specific technologies or devices, such as motor vehicles, as any statutory language would likely be soon outpaced by technology,” it continued.