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+1. Right to Repair is about not allowing artificial legal and technical restrictions on repairs, it's about providing necessary technical information, diagnost
by segfaultbuserr 6y ago
+1. Right to Repair is about not allowing artificial legal and technical restrictions on repairs, it's about providing necessary technical information, diagnostic software, and parts, but it has nothing do with the underlying difficulty of the repair.
Without Right to Repair, you won't get essential service manuals or schematics, the vendor can brick your device after you've replaced the battery via DRM, the vendor can refuse to provide replacement parts. With Right to Repair, you'll be able to get service manuals, schematics, replacement parts, and there won't be anti-repair DRM - which is why you should support Right to Repair legislations.
However, it has nothing to do on whether the repair should be technically easy. Under the Right to Repair, a device can still be so delicate that it would only ever be successfully repaired by a trained technician with 100 hours of experience with $1000 dollar rework equipment - if it's the case, your best hope is to find a repair shop with skilled technicians and adequate equipment, and maybe you'll get it fixed at a lower-than-official cost - which is certainly a possibility - but without your Right to Repair, even this possibility cannot exist.
If someone really wants to make something easier to repair by everyone (in other words, impose legal restrictions on how a device should be designed), you'll need a different set of regulations to address that. But at the present stage, I recommend to get your Right to Repair first, and understand what does it really mean - similar misunderstandings of Right to Right (= the vendor must make repair easy for everyone) has already been used in many strawman arguments by its opponents in the industry, using excuses such as safety, portability or costs, and in reality none of them really applies.
- amelius 6y agoDoes this also hold for the software installed on the device? Would a company be required to provide access to the system, and to provide all possible documentation?