Until now, these protections were exclusively in place for tractor hardware, of all things, but have just been expanded to include a wide variety of consumer electronics, including smartphones and appliances among others.
Many – if not all – of these programs require a recurring membership fee.
‘Right to repair's’ first major win in a larger war.
This is the US government’s way of saying that consumers should have the right to repair – get it?
– their own electronics without the producers of said products being involved in that process.
However, there is much more work to be done to truly satisfy the ‘right to repair’ movement in the US and abroad.
Namely, these rulings don’t make it any easier to bypass these pieces of software and firmware much less to physically replace any parts within. »
