Some products — like devices powered by combustion engines, medical equipment, farming equipment, HVAC equipment, video game consoles, and energy storage systems — are excluded from Oregon’s rules entirely.
It’s interesting to me that Game Consoles get an exception… Not sure whats up there, other than straight up
briberylobbying.HVAC makes sense when you consider environmental concerns (some refrigerants are really terrible pollutants).
Medical equipment, particularly equipment in public health care should be held to high standards. Authorized, properly trained repair; peoples lives depend on it.
Energy storage when attached to public infrastructure (you back-feeding the grid) can be a saftey concern for workers and the supply/load needs to be balanced to prevent damaging that infrastructure and other private equipment attached to it. Not sure preventing repair is the right move here; you can still buy and install new without oversight. Perhaps it’s again a saftey concern (for the person performing repair).
Vehicles, farming or otherwise, I’m on the fence about; there’s an argument to be made for public saftey/roadworthness, but I’m not sure that’s enough of an argument to prevent home-repair. Again seems more to do with lobbying than anything else.
John Deere probably
bribedlobbied hard for that carve out. It was their practices that helped drive the right to repair movement. Giving them a pass really diminishes the accomplishment.Smaller farms are going to get screwed over with all the fees and mandatory maintenance that can be imposed.
Everyone gets angry about printers needing a debit card on file but manufacturers like John Deere do similar stuff. If they think you’ve tinkered with it, they can disable the equipment remotely.
The farming equipment exemption smells like John Deere’s lobbies have been involved.
There are lots of loyal green customers who are really pissed about the ability to not be able to repair their own stuff, but yet keep buying it. (Similar to a lot of iPhone users)
but yet keep buying it.
Probably because they’ll keep repairing it themselves anyway. Making it legal would just make it easier for them to repair it without triggering the tractor’s version of DRM (can’t remember what it’s called).
That is getting really hard to do. Seems like someone could make a market in controllers that replace the factory ones but hook to the factory sensors.
Be careful what you wish for though. Electronics, and software in particular, rapidly drop in reliability as the parts stray from tightly restricted boundaries and become open to anyone. “Hey, this app crashes on my phone now.” Repairing a phone too wouldn’t be cheap either, you’d have to have someone soldering and resoldering a very fine circuit board. I think most people would just replace it.
This is literally nonsense fear mongering by someone who doesn’t understand how electronics and electronic repair work.
You don’t understand how consumer goods work
