While Canada may have a bunch of issues when it comes to technology, right to repair is a rare positive tech story.
Imagine, if you would, having a reliable piece of technology. Let’s say that piece of technology is a laptop. It’s personal to you and it has been rock solid reliable for years. Unfortunately, the battery is so old, it has all of 25 minutes of charge. No problem, you might think, just take it to a repair shop somewhere and hope that they can replace the battery for you.
You take this laptop in and the repair person frowns at the laptop. The person says that they’ll try to find a replacement, but can’t make any promises. About a week later, the repair person calls you up with the bad news. They can’t find a replacement battery and you can come in and pick up your laptop. While picking up the laptop, you are informed that you are probably better off buying a replacement laptop entirely. You ask around a few other repair shops just in case, but the answers are all the same.
It turns out, it’s not the repair shops fault. The manufacturer has “protected” the device with something known as Technical Protection Measures (or TPMs). As a result, reliable replacement parts are all but impossible to find for this particular manufacturer. Even worse, because the laptop is so old, the manufacturer is no longer offering repairs on top of it all. You are, as a result, completely out of luck in getting that laptop battery replaced.
This sort of problem is not an uncommon problem. When something breaks inside a device, it’s very difficult to find a replacement part in a number of instances. Breaking a TPM to fix something is, at best, a legal grey area or something you just keep hush hush about. Even worse, by throwing out the device afterwards after buying new, you are actually contributing to the worlds infamous e-waste problem (which involves, among other things, harsh chemicals).
The unfortunate thing in all of this is that manufacturers are financially incentivized to continue churning out products that are difficult to impossible to repair as well. After all, if a hard drive begins to fail, they get better profits if you replace the entire device. A cracked screen is often another major headache to repair as well and if they can get you to replace your entire otherwise working device with a whole new product, that means more change in their pockets and not in yours. So, there are efforts to lock down the products they sell so you are constantly buying new.
This is a huge part of the reason why there is a right to repair movement in the first place. If a hard drive can be replaced, why not be able to replace the hard drive and continue enjoying the device you have for a while longer? The benefits include a smaller environmental footprint, more money in consumers pockets, a healthy aftermarket ecosystem which creates spinoff jobs, and more. There is a lot of winning involved here.
Well, in Canada, we recently had a major victory in this regard. A series of bills known as right to repair bills have received royal assent and is now law. This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. The two bills in question are Bill C-244 and Bill C-294 and many agree that both go a long way in implementing a right to repair law. From the CBC:
New changes to Canada’s Copyright Act have become law, aimed at making it easier for people and independent repair technicians to fix the products they own, such as phones, fridges, and in the case of farmers, their tractors.
Many modern devices contain software and computer code, which is protected by copyright, preventing third-party repair technicians from being able to fix those products.
Bill C-244 allows individuals or third-party repair companies to bypass digital locks to make software fixes without violating copyright, while Bill C-294 allows those locks to be circumvented “to make (a) computer program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component.”
In a major win for the right to repair movement, both bills received royal assent last week and became law.
While American’s might get rather jealous that Canada has moved forward with this issue by quite a bit, there are still criticisms about how these laws don’t necessarily go far enough. From the Register:
Bills C-244 (repairability) and C-294 (interoperability) go a long way toward advancing the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit pointed out, are the first federal laws anywhere that address how TPMs restrict the right to repair – but they’re hardly final.
TPMs can take a number of forms, from simple administrative passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object like a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device’s software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary embedded software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 place any restrictions on the use of such measures by manufacturers.
As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so.
If you want to read the full article by iFixit, it can be found here.
Karl Bode of Techdirt notes that the battle for right to repair laws at the federal level are largely over with a massive loss:
Here in the States, any hopes for a federal right to repair law have been crushed by Trump’s electoral win. Activists have, however, had considerable luck passing numerous state right to repair laws.
Last March Oregon became the seventh state to pass “right to repair” legislation making it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to repair technology you own. The bill’s passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York (2023), Minnesota, Maine and California. All told, 30 states contemplated such bills in 2024.
The problem: I’ve yet to see any examples of these laws actually being enforced. And with Trumpism ushering in a whole bunch of new life and death legal struggles hinging at the state level (immigration, the dismantling of all federal consumer protection), I strongly suspect going toe to toe with major companies over right to repair won’t be a priority for state officials with limited resources.
Either way, though, a victory is a victory. While some of the tools to conduct repairs might be legally questionable still, the act of repairing these devices is now much more legal. That is a major win for everyone involved.
