Somebody explain "Right to repair"
Don't understand how this works legally. If I bought the item our transaction is over. How can companies retain the right to repair?
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[{quoted}](name=Ðeath XIII,realm=NA,application-id=yrc23zHg,discussion-id=7isbWA8O,comment-id=,timestamp=2018-10-20T01:01:39.192+0000)
Don't understand how this works legally. If I bought the item our transaction is over. How can companies retain the right to repair?
I think you might be referring to a manufacturers warranty. In that case the "right to repair" might be indicating that any action the consumer takes to try to repair it themself would void said warranty.
Right to repair in a nutshell: if you buy a product, you should not only be able to repair it per federal law, but the manufacturer should not be permitted to take steps to obstruct third party repair, and ideally make repair manuals available. In addition parts should be available to third-party repair shops.
Take the current apple repair ecosystem for example. You can either go to an apple store, an authorized repair center, or an unauthorized repair center. The authorized repair center basically has to jump through all sorts of hoops to remain in apple's good graces and maintain their access to parts. The unauthorized repair centers don't have that limitation, but they don't have the ability to buy any parts from apple nor do they even have the ability to get official repair manuals.
Now there is a rather insidious twist that companies like john deere have been taking recently that makes this even less fair. They have made it so that you have to use their tool to get diagnostic data out of the equipment, and that the diagnostic tool is not available to third-party repair services.
So what you have is companies circumventing the law by making it impossible for third-party repairs to exist, and that's bad. The right to repair movement aims to counteract this.
The counterpoint is to protect IP, but honestly... that's stupid as fuck if you're a company manufacturing in China.
It's literally to hold a monopoly on repair services.